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1AGAINST MINIMALISM CLIPS
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3For the privileged - as a movement of design, architecture, or lifestyle. It serves and celebrate the powerful. 
4A aesthetic system for people who can rely on others for their needs. That's why it's so stripped down, in the same way dining in a fancy restaurant is stripped down for the consumer. 
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8"A shape, a volume, a color, a surface is something itself. It shouldn't be concealed as part of a fairly different whole."
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10Donald Judd Signature
11Synopsis
12Minimalism emerged in New York in the early 1960s among artists who were self-consciously renouncing recent art they thought had become stale and academic. A wave of new influences and rediscovered styles led younger artists to question conventional boundaries between various media. The new art favored the cool over the "dramatic": their sculptures were frequently fabricated from industrial materials and emphasized anonymity over the expressive excess of Abstract Expressionism. Painters and sculptors avoided overt symbolism and emotional content, but instead called attention to the materiality of the works. By the end of the 1970s, Minimalism had triumphed in America and Europe through a combination of forces including museum curators, art dealers, and publications, plus new systems of private and government patronage. And members of a new movement, Post-Minimalism, were already challenging its authority and were thus a testament to how important Minimalism itself became.
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14Key Ideas
15Minimalists distanced themselves from the Abstract Expressionists by removing suggestions of biography from their art or, indeed, metaphors of any kind. This denial of expression coupled with an interest in making objects that avoided the appearance of fine art led to the creation of sleek, geometric works that purposefully and radically eschew conventional aesthetic appeal.
16The post-Sputnik era revived active interest in Russian Constructivism. The Constructivist approach led to the use of modular fabrication and industrial materials in preference to the craft techniques of traditional sculpture. The readymades of Marcel Duchamp were also inspirational examples of the employment of prefabricated materials. Based on these sources, Minimalists created works that resembled factory-built commodities and upended traditional definitions of art whose meaning was tied to a narrative or to the artist.
17The use of prefabricated industrial materials and simple, often repeated geometric forms together with the emphasis placed on the physical space occupied by the artwork led to some works that forced the viewer to confront the arrangement and scale of the forms. Viewers also were led to experience qualities of weight, height, gravity, agility or even the appearance of light as a material presence. They were often faced with artworks that demanded a physical as well as a visual response.
18Minimalists sought to breakdown traditional notions of sculpture and to erase distinctions between painting and sculpture. In particular, they rejected the formalist dogma espoused by the critic Clement Greenberg that placed limitations on the art of painting and privileged artists who seemed to paint under his direction. The Minimalists' more democratic point of view was set out in writings as well as exhibitions by their leaders Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris.
19Most Important Art
20Minimalism Famous Art	
21Die (1962)
22Artist: Tony Smith
23The artist's specifications for the sculpture were as follows: "a six-foot cube of quarter-inch hot-rolled steel with diagonal internal bracing." The dimensions were determined, according to Tony Smith, by the proportions of the human body. Smith explained that a larger scale would have endowed Die with the stature of a "monument," while a smaller one would have reduced it to a mere "object." Weighing approximately 500 pounds and resting on the museum floor, the sculpture invites us to walk around it and experience it sequentially, one or two sides at a time. Like other examples of Minimalism, its unreadable surface and frank lack of visual appeal come across as almost hostile in its undermining of traditional understandings of art as something aesthetically or emotionally appealing, showing the artist's rejection of Abstraction Expressionism's hands-on approach to art making.
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25The sculpture's deceptively simple title invites multiple associations: it alludes to die casting, to one of a pair of dice, and, ultimately, to death. As Smith remarked, "Six feet has a suggestion of being cooked. Six foot box. Six foot under." Rationality, evoked by Die's purely geometric configuration, is countered by the sculpture's brooding presence. Meaning becomes relative rather than absolute, something generated through the interplay of word and object. Weaving together strains of architecture, industrial manufacture, and the found object, Smith radically transformed the way sculpture could look, how it could be made, and, ultimately, how it could be understood.
26Read More ... 
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28Minimalism Artworks in Focus:
29 Die Fahne Hoch! (1959) Die (1962) Lever (1966) Untitled (mirrored cubes) (1965/71) Untitled (1969) One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969) Two Open Modular Cubes/Half-Off (1972) The X (1965) Untitled (in honor of Harold Joachim) 3, 1977 (1977)
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31Minimalism Overview Continues Below
32SPONSORED
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34Beginnings
35Early Modernist Inspirations
36In New York City in the mid 1950s, young artists like Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Dan Flavin were painting in the dominant Abstract Expressionist vein but were drifting from it toward new directions inspired by a freshened knowledge of recent European art. Works by members of the Dutch De Stijl group, the Russian Constructivists, and the German Bauhaus were shown in New York City museums and galleries. All three groups had pioneered new definitions of the visual arts by going far beyond traditional painting and sculpture.
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38Piet Mondrian, a central proponent of De Stijl, adopted pure abstraction and promoted a dynamic tension across the canvas surface and emphasized the flatness of the picture plane. No longer would a painting pretend to be a window to another world. The Homage to the Square paintings (1949-76) of Josef Albers, a former teacher at the Bauhaus, used arrangements of squares within squares in which pictorial depth was an illusion based on color contrasts of the squares. Vladimir Tatlin led the creation of a new art in Russia that would synthesize art and technology in the Machine Age that had come to his country. A utopian idealist more than a revolutionary, he wanted to bring art to the service of everyday life.
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40Among sculptors, the Romanian Constantin Brancusi was also a proto-Minimalist. His The Endless Column (1935), a tower of identical rhomboid shapes pointing to infinity represented his cosmic spiritual beliefs and aspirations for his art by demonstrating how simple shapes in multiples could extend ideas of form in space. And Marcel Duchamp's career would lead to a redefinition of the artist's persona and relationship to art making. With sophisticated wit he condemned the "retinal pleasures" of painting and within his practice combined painting, kinetic and static sculpture, photography, and film.
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42Art at Mid-Century: Late Modernism
43These early influences gave artists the opportunity to reassess the Surrealist-influenced world of Abstract Expressionism defined by intuitive and spontaneous gestures that had been dominant in American art for almost two decades, largely because of the critical support of writers such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. In contrast to the more expressionistic painters, the artists Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman emphasized the power of color and simplicity of design within the canvas field. Dubbed a Color Field painter, Rothko laid broad bands of color horizontally across the canvas while Newman discovered the skinny vertical zip motifs that divided his fields into zones of flat painted color. In each case the viewer became absorbed in the atmosphere of these large-scale works. Their more radical compatriot Ad Reinhardt painted solid fields of monochromatic red or black that banished all but the most subtle evidence of an artist's involvement in the work. Active as a writer, critic, and educator, he famously said, "My paintings are the last paintings one can make," and thereby endeared himself to the next generation of creators.
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45The artists who became Minimalists wanted instead to produce an art that was less personal and more substantial, believing that a work of art should not refer to anything other than itself. Thus by the early 1960s, many of these artists had abandoned painting altogether in favor of objects that seemed neither painting nor sculpture in the conventional sense. For example, Frank Stella's Black Paintings (1958-60), a series of hugely influential, concentrically striped canvases were stretched on a thicker wooden chassis that thrust them out from the wall aggressively. This support emphasized the materiality and objecthood of paintings that were clearly abstractions, lacked evidence of brushwork, and achieved a state of flatness that was exemplary to others. Stella's paintings extended the possibilities of painting beyond simple rectangles to be framed (which they weren't) and hung on a wall as ornament. His works instead assumed physical characteristics of both architecture and sculpture that contradicted all previous examples of painting.
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47Stella's achievement was echoed in the work of other abstract artists who were making large paintings that seemed to be based on geometric theorems. Kenneth Noland, who pursued Josef Albers's theories on the "interaction of colors," painted large abstract canvases that featured targets, chevrons, and striped patterns. Robert Mangold's monochromatic free-standing constructions were also affected by the prevalence of geometric abstraction that Albers had introduced.
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49The Start of Minimalism and Conceptual Art
50In the next generation there were many theorists who became important spokespersons for the movements of both Minimal and Conceptual art, a contemporaneous style. These artists and writers helped determine the aesthetics and the critical reception of both styles.
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52Donald Judd's "Specific Objects," published in 1965, attempted to establish the aesthetics of Minimalism. He in fact rejected the name "Minimalism" to characterize the art, favoring instead the term "specific objects," which he described as rejecting traditional distinctions between art forms to embrace works that were not easily labeled as either painting or sculpture.
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54Robert Morris wrote the three-part "Notes on Sculptures" in 1966, in which he called for the use of simple forms that could be grasped intuitively by the viewer and argued that the interpretation of Minimalist works was dependent on the context and conditions in which they were perceived. In making this argument he was essentially upending the notion of the artwork as having an inherent meaning - derived from the artist - that was independent of the viewer.
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56Sol LeWitt contributed to the development of both movements. He published, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art"(1967) (considered by many to be the movement's manifesto), in which he wrote: "What the work of art looks like isn't too important. It has to look like something if it has physical form. No matter what form it may finally have it must begin with an idea. It is the process of conception and realization with which the artist is concerned." For 40 years until his death in 2007, LeWitt worked internationally as a sculptor, painter, and photographer and was the leader of the Minimalist artists after the deaths of Flavin and Judd.
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58Carl Andre published poetry that had both literary and visual appeal, the latter created by the artistic shaping of the text of the poem as if the words were a solid medium. These poems were an integral part of Andre's exhibitions, where they sometimes appeared in catalogue entries or next to his sculptures.
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60Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs (1965) is a Conceptual milestone in which he assembled an object, a photograph of that object, and an enlarged dictionary definition of the object for a gallery exhibition. It questions what actually constitutes a chair in our thinking: is it the solid object we see and use or is it the word "chair" that we use to identify it and communicate it to others?
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62As a result of all these theoretical underpinings, the Minimalism movement found the setting to expand.
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64The Title of the Movement
65From this multitude of sources the artists who became known as Minimalists plotted the new strategies that informed their projects and processes. Many names were floated to characterize this new art: "A.B.C. art," "Reductive Art," "literalism," "systemic painting," and "Art of the Real." "Minimalism" was the term that eventually stuck, perhaps because it best described the way the artists reduced art to the minimum number of colors, shapes, lines, and textures. Minimalism was also an accepted critical term in contemporary dance and music which, like the visual arts, was being stripped of ornament, used repetitive motifs, and found its settings in everyday, urban life rather than myths and legends of the past.
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67The Primary Structures Exhibition
68The 1966 exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York was a major event that attracted critical attention and established Minimalism as a significant force in the art world. The show included works by many of those who were important to the movement, including Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd as well as some artists who were on its fringes, such as Ellsworth Kelly and Anthony Caro - over forty artists in total. Exhibitions like Primary Structures were accompanied by publications and critical reviews that advanced and broadened the discourse over both Minimalism and Conceptual art.
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70A New Art for New Spaces
71In the 1960s and 1970s new exhibition spaces were opening in Europe and America. Traditional museums expanded their gallery facilities and new "kunsthalles," exhibition facilities without permanent collections, were created. The role of university galleries and museums was also expanded. Artist-run cooperative galleries like Artists Space in New York were emulated elsewhere. Typically these galleries took over large rough spaces that were frequently "laboratories" where Minimal and Conceptual artists tried out their work. By the 1970s there was a true boom in public art that brought Minimalist sculptors national recognition. State and local agencies established public sculpture parks where Minimalist sculpture flourished.
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73The new publication Artforum was started in California in 1962 relocated to New York City in 1967. Through several editorships the magazine developed and was by 1971 the trade journal for Minimalist and Conceptual art. In addition to reviews, it published work submitted by artists as well as the most thoughtful commentary on contemporary art.
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75Concepts and Styles
76Minimalist Sculpture
77Most Minimalists were focused on creating three-dimensional objects, as this was the most radical and experimental facet of the movement. The Minimalists' emphasis on eradicating signs of authorship from their art by using simple, geometric forms and industrial materials led to works that resembled simple objects rather than traditional sculpture. The innovative placement of these works on the floor of gallery spaces rather than on pedestals further underscored their difference from conventional works of art.
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79The focus on surface and the artist's absence meant that the meaning of the object was not seen as inherent to the object itself, but came from the viewer's interaction with the object. This led to a new emphasis on the physical space in which the artwork resided. In part, this development was inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty's writings on phenomenology, in particular, The Phenomenology of Perception (1945).
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81Minimalist Paintings
82Aside from sculptors, Minimalism is also associated with a few key abstract painters, such as Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, and Robert Ryman. These artists painted simple canvases that were considered minimal due to their barebones, often geometric compositions. Using only line, solid color, and sometimes geometric forms and shaped canvases, these artists combined painting materials in such a way that questioned the traditional dichotomy between artistic media by making paintings that could also be considered objects in their own right because of the bulkiness of the canvas support and the nontraditional shapes of the paintings.
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84Minimalist Light Installations
85This use of florescent light tubes to create art further emphasized the Minimalist move away from traditional art forms. Dan Flavin used light and color from commercially available tubes to sculpt space into color zones. While the tubes were sometimes arranged in geometric shapes such as grids or simple lines, the focus of the art was typically on the light emitted rather than the form of the tubes themselves. The standard industrial fixtures that held the tubes were also useful as compositional elements. Turned to the viewer, their blank sides contrasted to the outward facing colored light in the grid pieces. Younger artists Keith Sonnier and Bruce Nauman saw the potential of light in sculpture and used neon tubing in combination with other materials and lettering.
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87Other Minimalists
88The unadorned style and system-bound concepts of Minimalism found followers in architecture and interior design, where a revival of the International Style of the 1920s occurred and even Art Deco received a fresh look. Contemporary choreographers eliminated fussy costumes, and dancers performed to the strict, repetitive music by Minimalist composers on bare stages. Even, the frugal-appearing low-calorie plates of nouvelle cuisine imported from Paris were another phenomenon of Minimalism.
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90Further Developments
91By the late 1960s, just a few years after the movement was born, Minimalism was diversifying into many disciplines to such an extent that it could no longer be seen as a coherent style or tendency: various artists who had been important to its early development began to move in different personal directions. New ideas and styles quickly came to dominate the emerging world.
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93Art and Objecthood
94Detractors of Minimalist art were led by Michael Fried, whose essay "Art and Objecthood" was published in Artforum in 1967. Although the essay seemed to confirm the importance of the movement as a turning point in the history of modern art, Fried was uncomfortable with what it heralded. Referring to the movement as "literalism" and those who made it as "literalists," he accused artists like Judd and Morris of intentionally confusing the categories of art and ordinary objects. According to Fried, what these artists were creating was not art, but a political and/or ideological statement about the nature of art. Fried maintained that just because Judd and Morris arranged identical non-art objects in a three-dimensional field and proclaimed it "art," it didn't necessarily make it so. Fried mildly ridiculed their efforts by warning them against what he perceived as theatricality in the justifications they made for their installations. This was in direct confrontation in particular with Morris, who described the importance of the duration of time and the viewer's movements needed to experience the art and the importance of the perceptions gathered by the viewer.
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96Post-Minimalism
97As the 1960s progressed, offshoots of Minimalism developed under the rubric of Post-Minimalism. Some of these, like works by Richard Serra, were extensions of Minimalist theories, but most were challenges to Minimalism's rigorous appearance. Californian Robert Irwin painted luminescent discs and minimalist canvases with faint stripes, but in 1969 he began making large gallery installations using available light sources concealed behind translucent screens. His works inspired the Light and Space movement joined by California sculptors Larry Bell and James Turrell. Such installations were openly theatrical and their simplicity suggested Zen Buddhist philosophy instead of formalism.
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99New venues encouraged more installations where Minimalist aesthetics were perceivable but strongly countered by independent visions. Lynda Benglis and Eva Hesse experimented with poured and shaped industrial resins that introduced an organic appearance when hung from the ceiling, projecting off the walls or scattered on the floor. Nancy Graves fabricated simulations of animal skins.
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101Robert Smithson organized an exhibition of Land art that posed an explicit challenge to conventional notions of sculpture and stretched Minimalist definitions. His Earthworks were made with bulldozers in remote locations and represented only by photographs. Following Smithson's example, Michael Heizer, Richard Long, and Walter de Maria removed art from galleries and turned the earth itself into artistic material. The boundaries between "sculpture" and "object" were eroded, and new definitions of art and creativity were revealed.
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103Minimalism and the Next Stage of Feminism
104Viewing the success of the Minimalist sculptors in particular, feminists criticized what they saw as the rhetoric of power in the brutality of some of the works. The concept of Feminist art arose concurrent with Post-Minimalism and developed its own polemics born out of this era of consciousness-raising. Initially Feminist art was visibly handmade, craft-based, and incorporated ritual beliefs and icons: it was openly opposed to Minimalism and celebrated "the goddess." For example, Judy Chicago created The Dinner Party (1974), an enormous installation of ceramic place settings for thirty-nine historically famous women that was rich in cultural and totemic symbolism. It toured museums in America for five years, inspiring many collateral exhibitions along the route.
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106Throughout the twentieth century women had been underrepresented in museums and galleries and lacked organization until one of the leading Minimalist artists and theorists - Robert Morris - appeared in a poster for a 1974 exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery bare-chested and wearing chains and a Nazi-era helmet. Women who had participated in the Civil Rights Movement rose up against Morris and this image and began to call for gender equity in art practices. They published manifestos, picketed galleries and founded magazines such as Heresies, A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics (1977-92). The Woman's Building in Los Angeles and AIR Gallery in New York were established for women to show collaboratively and in solo exhibitions. The National Museum of Women in the Arts was founded in Washington, DC, in 1981 and moved into its own building in 1987, but by this time the objectives of the feminists had largely been realized.
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110Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post–World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Ad Reinhardt, Tony Smith, Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Larry Bell, Anne Truitt, Yves Klein and Frank Stella. Artists themselves have sometimes reacted against the label due to the negative implication of the work being simplistic.[1] Minimalism is often interpreted as a reaction against Abstract expressionism and a bridge to Postminimal art practices.
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112Minimalism in visual art, generally referred to as "minimal art", literalist art [2] and ABC Art[3] emerged in New York in the early 1960s.[4] Initially minimal art appeared in New York in the 60s as new and older artists moved toward geometric abstraction; exploring via painting in the cases of Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Ryman and others; and sculpture in the works of various artists including David Smith, Anthony Caro, Tony Smith, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and others. Judd's sculpture was showcased in 1964 at the Green Gallery in Manhattan as were Flavin's first fluorescent light works, while other leading Manhattan galleries like the Leo Castelli Gallery and the Pace Gallery also began to showcase artists focused on geometric abstraction. In addition there were two seminal and influential museum exhibitions: Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculpture' shown from April 27 - June 12, 1966 at the Jewish Museum in New York, organized by the museum's Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Kynaston McShine [5][6] and Systemic Painting, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum curated by Lawrence Alloway also in 1966 that showcased Geometric abstraction in the American art world via Shaped canvas, Color Field, and Hard-edge painting.[7][8][9] In the wake of those exhibitions and a few others the art movement called minimal art emerged.
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114Jean Metzinger, following the Succès de scandale created from the Cubist showing at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, in an interview with Cyril Berger published in Paris-Journal 29 May 1911, stated:
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116We cubists have only done our duty by creating a new rhythm for the benefit of humanity. Others will come after us who will do the same. What will they find? That is the tremendous secret of the future. Who knows if someday, a great painter, looking with scorn on the often brutal game of supposed colorists and taking the seven colors back to the primordial white unity that encompasses them all, will not exhibit completely white canvases, with nothing, absolutely nothing on them. (Jean Metzinger, 29 May 1911)[10][11]
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118Metzinger's (then) audacious prediction that artists would take abstraction to its logical conclusion by vacating representational subject matter entirely and returning to what Metzinger calls the "primordial white unity", a "completely white canvas" would be realized two years later. The writer of a satirical manifesto, possibly Francis Picabia, in a publication entitled Evolution de l'art: Vers l'amorphisme, in Les Hommes du Jour (3 May 1913), may have had Metzinger's vision in mind when the author justified amorphism's blank canvases by claiming 'light is enough for us'.[11] With perspective, writes art historian Jeffery S. Weiss, "Vers Amorphisme may be gibberish, but it was also enough of a foundational language to anticipate the extreme reductivist implications of non-objectivity".[13]
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120Monochrome painting was initiated at the first Incoherent arts' exhibition in 1882 in Paris, with a black painting by poet Paul Bilhaud entitled "Combat de Nègres dans un tunnel" (Negroes fight in a tunnel). In the subsequent exhibitions of the Incoherent arts (also in the 1880s) the writer Alphonse Allais proposed seven other monochrome paintings, such as "Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige" ("First communion of anaemic young girls in the snow", white), or "Récolte de la tomate par des cardinaux apoplectiques au bord de la Mer Rouge" ("Tomato harvesting by apoplectic cardinals on the shore of the Red Sea", red). However, this kind of activity bears more similarity to 20th century Dada, or Neo-Dada, and particularly the works of the Fluxus group of the 1960s, than to 20th century monochrome painting since Malevich.
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122In a broad and general sense, one finds European roots of minimalism in the geometric abstractions of painters associated with the Bauhaus, in the works of Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian and other artists associated with the De Stijl movement, and the Russian Constructivist movement, and in the work of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși.[14][15] Minimal art is also inspired in part by the paintings of Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Josef Albers, and the works of artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio Morandi, and others. Minimalism was also a reaction against the painterly subjectivity of Abstract Expressionism that had been dominant in the New York School during the 1940s and 1950s.[16]
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124The wide range of possibilities (including impossibility) of interpretation of monochrome paintings is arguably why the monochrome is so engaging to so many artists, critics, and writers. Although the monochrome has never become dominant and few artists have committed themselves exclusively to it, it has never gone away. It reappears as though a spectre haunting high modernism, or as a symbol of it, appearing during times of aesthetic and sociopolitical upheavals.[17]
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126Monochrome revival
127In France between 1947 and 1948,[18] Yves Klein conceived his Monotone Symphony (1949, formally The Monotone-Silence Symphony) that consisted of a single 20-minute sustained chord followed by a 20-minute silence[19][20] – a precedent to both La Monte Young's drone music and John Cage's 4′33″. Although Klein had painted monochromes as early as 1949, and held the first private exhibition of this work in 1950, his first public showing was the publication of the Artist's book Yves: Peintures in November 1954.[21][22]
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129Artist and critic Thomas Lawson noted in his 1981 essay "Last Exit: Painting" Artforum, October: 40-47, minimalism did not reject Clement Greenberg's claims about modernist painting's [23] reduction to surface and materials so much as take his claims literally. According to Lawson minimalism was the result, even though the term "minimalism" was not generally embraced by the artists associated with it, and many practitioners of art designated minimalist by critics did not identify it as a movement as such. Also taking exception to this claim was Clement Greenberg himself; in his 1978 postscript to his essay Modernist Painting he disavowed this incorrect interpretation of what he said; Greenberg wrote:
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131There have been some further constructions of what I wrote that go over into preposterousness: That I regard flatness and the inclosing of flatness not just as the limiting conditions of pictorial art, but as criteria of aesthetic quality in pictorial art; that the further a work advances the self-definition of an art, the better that work is bound to be. The philosopher or art historian who can envision me—or anyone at all—arriving at aesthetic judgments in this way reads shockingly more into himself or herself than into my article.[23]
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133In contrast to the previous decade's more subjective Abstract Expressionists, with the exceptions of Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt; minimalists were also influenced by composers John Cage and LaMonte Young, poet William Carlos Williams, and the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. They very explicitly stated that their art was not about self-expression, unlike the previous decade's more subjective philosophy about art making theirs was 'objective'. In general, Minimalism's features included geometric, often cubic forms purged of much metaphor, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, and industrial materials.
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135Robert Morris, an influential theorist and artist, wrote a three part essay, "Notes on Sculpture 1-3", originally published across three issues of Artforum in 1966. In these essays, Morris attempted to define a conceptual framework and formal elements for himself and one that would embrace the practices of his contemporaries. These essays paid great attention to the idea of the gestalt - "parts... bound together in such a way that they create a maximum resistance to perceptual separation." Morris later described an art represented by a "marked lateral spread and no regularized units or symmetrical intervals..." in "Notes on Sculpture 4: Beyond Objects", originally published in Artforum, 1969, continuing to say that "indeterminacy of arrangement of parts is a literal aspect of the physical existence of the thing." The general shift in theory of which this essay is an expression suggests the transitions into what would later be referred to as postminimalism. One of the first artists specifically associated with minimalism was the painter, Frank Stella, whose early "pinstripe" paintings were included in the 1959 show, 16 Americans, organized by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The width of the stripes in Frank Stellas's pinstripe paintings were determined by the dimensions of the lumber used for stretchers, visible as the depth of the painting when viewed from the side, used to construct the supportive chassis upon which the canvas was stretched. The decisions about structures on the front surface of the canvas were therefore not entirely subjective, but pre-conditioned by a "given" feature of the physical construction of the support. In the show catalog, Carl Andre noted, "Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting." These reductive works were in sharp contrast to the energy-filled and apparently highly subjective and emotionally charged paintings of Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline and, in terms of precedent among the previous generation of abstract expressionists, leaned more toward the less gestural, often somber, color field paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Although Stella received immediate attention from the MoMA show, artists including Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Robert Motherwell and Robert Ryman had also begun to explore stripes, monochromatic and Hard-edge formats from the late 50s through the 1960s.[24]
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137Because of a tendency in minimal art to exclude the pictorial, illusionistic and fictive in favor of the literal, there was a movement away from painterly and toward sculptural concerns. Donald Judd had started as a painter, and ended as a creator of objects. His seminal essay, "Specific Objects" (published in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965), was a touchstone of theory for the formation of minimalist aesthetics. In this essay, Judd found a starting point for a new territory for American art, and a simultaneous rejection of residual inherited European artistic values. He pointed to evidence of this development in the works of an array of artists active in New York at the time, including Jasper Johns, Dan Flavin and Lee Bontecou. Of "preliminary" importance for Judd was the work of George Earl Ortman,[25] who had concretized and distilled painting's forms into blunt, tough, philosophically charged geometries. These Specific Objects inhabited a space not then comfortably classifiable as either painting or sculpture. That the categorical identity of such objects was itself in question, and that they avoided easy association with well-worn and over-familiar conventions, was a part of their value for Judd.
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139This movement was heavily criticised by modernist formalist art critics and historians. Some critics thought minimal art represented a misunderstanding of the modern dialectic of painting and sculpture as defined by critic Clement Greenberg, arguably the dominant American critic of painting in the period leading up to the 1960s. The most notable critique of minimalism was produced by Michael Fried, a formalist critic, who objected to the work on the basis of its "theatricality". In Art and Objecthood (published in Artforum in June 1967) he declared that the minimal work of art, particularly minimal sculpture, was based on an engagement with the physicality of the spectator. He argued that work like Robert Morris's transformed the act of viewing into a type of spectacle, in which the artifice of the act observation and the viewer's participation in the work were unveiled. Fried saw this displacement of the viewer's experience from an aesthetic engagement within, to an event outside of the artwork as a failure of minimal art. Fried's essay was immediately challenged by postminimalist and earth artist Robert Smithson in a letter to the editor in the October issue of Artforum. Smithson stated the following: "What Fried fears most is the consciousness of what he is doing--namely being himself theatrical."
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141In addition to the already mentioned Robert Morris, Frank Stella, Carl Andre, Robert Ryman and Donald Judd other minimal artists include: Robert Mangold, Larry Bell, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Ronald Bladen, Agnes Martin, Jo Baer, Paul Mogensen, Ronald Davis, Charles Hinman, David Novros, Brice Marden, Blinky Palermo, John McCracken, Ad Reinhardt, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Patricia Johanson, and Anne Truitt.
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143Ad Reinhardt, actually an artist of the Abstract Expressionist generation, but one whose reductive nearly all-black paintings seemed to anticipate minimalism, had this to say about the value of a reductive approach to art:
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145The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature.[26]
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147Reinhardt's remark directly addresses and contradicts Hans Hofmann's regard for nature as the source of his own abstract expressionist paintings. In a famous exchange between Hofmann and Jackson Pollock as told by Lee Krasner in an interview with Dorothy Strickler (1964-11-02) for the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art.[27] In Krasner's words,
148
149"When I brought Hofmann up to meet Pollock and see his work which was before we moved here, Hofmann's reaction was — one of the questions he asked Jackson was, do you work from nature? There were no still lifes around or models around and Jackson's answer was, I am nature. And Hofmann's reply was, Ah, but if you work by heart, you will repeat yourself. To which Jackson did not reply at all." The meeting between Pollock and Hofmann took place in 1942.[27]
150
151--------------------------------
152From Minimalism in Art and Design: Concept, influences, implications and perspectives, by Cedric VanEenoo
153University of Technology Sydney, Australia. E-mail: 11537495@uts.edu.au
154Accepted 19 April, 2011
155
156"The term Minimalist is often applied colloquially to designate or suggest anything which is spare or
157stripped to its absolute essentials. It has its origins with an art critic seeking to describe what he saw,
158but has also been used to describe such diverse genres as plays by authors such as Samuel Beckett,
159films by director Robert Bresson (the narratives of Raymond Carver), the simple musical works of
160composer Philip Glass (the art installations of Sol LeWitt), the German Bauhaus art movement and even
161the cars designed by Colin Chapman and the educational principles of John Carroll among others. This
162paper considers why understanding of the concept is not only necessary but also useful. The principle
163of Minimalism is proposed as being a useful theoretical tool which supports a more differentiated
164understanding of reduction, and thus creates a standpoint that allows the definition of simplicity in its
165various aspects."
166
167"In New Media Arts, Minimalism is a way of expressing an
168idea and is an inescapable theme in modern day social
169concerns as well as art. As its name suggests,
170Minimalism means using limited material to create a
171desired effect. A minimalist artist will typically use a
172limited palette of colors and have a simplified geometric
173design, as in the works of David Smith, which can be
174seen at the Gagosian Gallery in New York City.
175Minimalist sculpture on the other hand is greatly focused
176on the materials. While many claim that Minimalism is a
177movement specific to geometric representations, it
178extends in the modern day far outside this relatively
179narrow constraint. The influences of Minimalism are deep
180and meaningful. Aristotle‟s “Horror Vacui” states that
181empty space would always be trying to suck in gas or
182liquids to avoid being empty. More recently, Donald Judd
183said:
184“It is not necessary for a work to have lots of things to
185look at, to compare, to analyze, one by one, and to
186contemplate. The thing as a whole, and its qualities as a
187whole is what is interesting.”
188
189What philosophical and social implications does
190Minimalism have in the twenty-first century? It would be
191necessary to see where it originates. The term itself, now
192common parlance, first appeared in the New York of
1931929 when David Burlyuk used it in a catalogue for an
194exhibition at the Dudensing Gallery of John Graham‟s
195paintings as described on the Worldwide Art Resources
196web page Art History: Minimalism (1960 to 1975), but
197was largely unheard outside the small world of art and
198design circles until the late 20th century. Even today, its
199definition is difficult as it covers such diverse genres.
200Minimalism still exists despite the fact that it is
201pronounced dead from time to time. Kyle Gann in 1998
202for instance declared that the term, as far as music was
203concerned was confined to a particular American group
204of composers and that critics declared the movement to
205be dead by 1978. Gann explains how the minimalist
206music of composer Philip Glass was condemned as
207being a dumbing down of music for a public incapable of
208understanding anything more complicated.
209Minimalism is not only recognizable but visible on many
210fronts. The style once considered to be subversive has
211over time become acceptable, in part because it is so
212widespread in society at all levels. 
213
214--------------------------------
215It has become an ostentatious ritual of consumerist self-sacrifice; people who have it all now seem to prefer having nothing at all. And, as with watching birds or going Paleo, talking about the material purge is just as important as actually doing it. So there are blog posts — in which you can see minimalism’s can-do optimism curdle into something tyrannical.
216
217A recent account, called “How Minimalism Brought Me Freedom and Joy,” is emblematic of the budding genre, from its author (a wealthy serial entrepreneur, James Altucher) to its thesis (own fewer things, mostly gadgets) to its one-sentence paragraphs. Altucher explains that he gave up his permanent home, life goals and negative emotions. He threw away his college diploma, which had been gathering dust in storage. (“I don’t hold onto all the things society tells me to hold onto.”) He now carries nothing but a bag of clothes and a backpack containing a computer, an iPad and a smartphone. “I have zero other possessions,” he writes, and thanks to this, he has found peace as a wandering techno-ascetic — Silicon Valley’s version of Zen monkhood.
218
219Despite its connotations of absence, “minimalism” has been popping up everywhere lately, like a bright algae bloom in the murk of postrecession America. From tiny houses to microapartments to monochromatic clothing to interior-decorating trends — picture white walls interrupted only by succulents — less now goes further than ever. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the minimalism glut, as the word can be applied to just about anything. The nearly four million images tagged #minimalism on Instagram include white sneakers, clouds, the works of Mondrian, neon signs, crumbling brick walls and grassy fields. So long as it’s stylishly austere, it seems, it’s minimalist.
220
221Part pop philosophy and part aesthetic, minimalism presents a cure-all for a certain sense of capitalist overindulgence. Maybe we have a hangover from pre-recession excess — McMansions, S.U.V.s, neon cocktails, fusion cuisine — and minimalism is the salutary tonic. Or perhaps it’s a method of coping with recession-induced austerity, a collective spiritual and cultural cleanse because we’ve been forced to consume less anyway. But as an outgrowth of a peculiarly American (that is to say, paradoxical and self-defeating) brand of Puritanical asceticism, this new minimalist lifestyle always seems to end in enabling new modes of consumption, a veritable excess of less. It’s not really minimal at all.
222
223To wealthy practitioners, minimalism is now little more than a slightly intriguing perversion, like drinking at breakfast.
224
225The word’s meaning wasn’t entirely literal when it first came into being; “minimalism” was popularized in 1965 as an insult. In an essay for Arts Magazine, the British philosopher Richard Wollheim used it to describe a group of artists whose work was characterized by “minimal art content” — that is, a lack of art. Arranging bricks on a gallery floor (as Carl Andre did) or manufacturing metal boxes (Donald Judd) or fluorescent light fixtures (Dan Flavin) simply wasn’t, in Wollheim’s estimation, enough to make an object worthy of the title. For good reason, the artists singled out in the essay didn’t identify with Wollheim’s appellation. They used industrial materials to remove themselves from their work, intentionally. In their eyes, this formal frugality was a necessary correction to the heroic individualism of New York School Abstract Expressionism. (After some time, what can you see in a Pollock but Pollock himself?) But the name stuck.
226
227Still, the artists were maximalists of a sort: The austerity of their objects freed the viewer to experience the work in any way they wished. “Minimalism can return you to this basic state where you’re perceiving purely,” says David Raskin, a professor of contemporary art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “Less is more because you strip away the familiar,” opening an opportunity to see the world without preconceptions. The objects might look mundane, but rather than the plain metal box on the floor, it’s the stark sensory experience the object incites that is the art, no previous knowledge necessary. The artist opens a radical infinity of possibilities. “Minimalism in the 1960s was very much along the lines of taking LSD,” says Miguel de Baca, an associate professor of art history at Lake Forest College.
228
229Continue reading the main story
230RECENT COMMENTS
231Lazenne August 1, 2016
232Arielle Bernstein and all the other minimalists ought to emigrate to Cuba where there's almost nothing to waste precious pedicure time on,...
233
234Julie Eakin August 1, 2016
235I find all the recent ponderous writing about minimalism its least interesting and most unfortunate consequence.
236
237AMC August 1, 2016
238It isn't chance that the author talks almost exclusively about wealthy men. While he focuses on the wealth part of that equation, the male...
239
240SEE ALL COMMENTS
241“Minimalism” was eventually canonized as an art-historical movement, but the name came to mean something different as it was adopted into consumer culture and turned into a class signifier. What was once a way artists shocked viewers became over the decades a style as delimited and consumable as any Martha Stewart tablescape. The word was defanged, no longer a critical insult and no longer a viable strategy within art — though it never quite gave up its veneer of provocation. Even austerity can be made decadent: To wealthy practitioners, minimalism is now little more than a slightly intriguing perversion, like drinking at breakfast. “One of the real problems with design-world minimalism is that it’s just become a signifier of the global elite,” Raskin says. “The richer you are, the less you have.”
242
243The minimalists’ aesthetic of raw materials and aggressive simplicity leaked into fashion, design and architecture, where it became a luxury product, helped along at times by the artists themselves. Judd’s SoHo loft building is now an icon of sanitized minimalism, open to tourists. His Chinati Foundation, a permanent installation of concrete and metal boxes in and around a decommissioned military base in Marfa, Tex., is a site of hipster pilgrimage. It even appears in Ben Lerner’s “10:04,” a novel redolent of late-capitalist anxiety. The protagonist visits the town on an artist’s residency, where he wanders the desert landscape, parties with young people and accidentally ingests ketamine — but it’s Judd’s installation that provides an epiphany. The sculptures, he writes, “combined to collapse my sense of inside and outside.” Judd’s work “had itself come to contain the world.”
244
245Often driven by technology, this optimization is expensive and exclusively branded by and for the elite.
246
247Today’s minimalism, by contrast, is visually oppressive; it comes with an inherent pressure to conform to its precepts. Whiteness, in a literal sense, is good. Mess, heterogeneity, is bad — the opposite impulse of artistic minimalism. It is anxiety-inducing in a manner indistinguishable from other forms of consumerism, not revolutionary at all. Do I own the right things? Have I jettisoned enough of the wrong ones? In a recent interview with Apartamento magazine set against interior shots of his all-white home in Rockaway, Queens, the tastemaker and director of MoMA PS1 Klaus Biesenbach explained, “I don’t aim to own things.”
248
249Minimalism is now conflated with self-optimization, the trend that also resulted in fitness trackers and Soylent (truly a minimalist food — it looks like nothing, but inspires thoughts of everything else). Often driven by technol­ogy, this optimization is expensive and exclusively branded by and for the elite. In Silicon Valley, the minimalism fetish can perhaps be traced back to Steve Jobs’s famously austere 1980s apartment (he sat on the floor) and the attendant simplicity of Apple products. Pare down, and you, too, could run a $700 billion company. A thriving Reddit forum on minimalism debates the worth of Muji products and which hobbies count as minimalist-appropriate, in a communal attempt to live the most effective, if perhaps not the most joyful, life.
250
251These minimalist-arrivistes present it as a logical end to lifestyle, culture and even morality: If we attain only the right things, the perfect things, and forsake all else, then we will be free from the tyranny of our desires. But time often proves aesthetic permanence, as well as moral high ground, to be illusory. And already, the pendulum is swinging back.
252
253Writing in The Atlantic in March, Arielle Bernstein described minimalism’s ban on clutter as a “privilege” that runs counter to the value ascribed to an abundance of objects by those who have suffered from a lack of them — less-empowered people like refugees or immigrants. The movement, such as it is, is led in large part by a group of men who gleefully ditch their possessions as if to disavow the advantages by which they obtained them. But it takes a lot to be minimalist: social capital, a safety net and access to the internet. The technology we call minimalist might fit in our pockets, but it depends on a vast infrastructure of grim, air-conditioned server farms and even grimmer Chinese factories. As Lerner’s protagonist observes in “10:04,” even a dull convenience like a can of instant coffee grounds reaches him thanks to a fragile and tremendously wasteful network of global connections, a logistics chain that defies all logic, one undergirded by exploited laborers and vast environmental degradation.
254
255There’s an arrogance to today’s minimalism that presumes it provides an answer rather than, as originally intended, a question: What other perspectives are possible when you look at the world in a different way? The fetishized austerity and performative asceticism of minimalism is a kind of ongoing cultural sickness. We misinterpret material renunciation, austere aesthetics and blank, emptied spaces as symbols of capitalist absolution, when these trends really just provide us with further ways to serve our impulse to consume more, not less.
256
257Kyle Chayka is a writer living in Brooklyn.
258===============================
259
260
261The Case Against Minimalism: When It's Good to Want More
262Here's what I want to admit even though it feels uncomfortable: I want a big life. I want greatness. I want big impact.
263
264I'm done lessening my desire. Simplicity sounds like something I should want. But honestly? I want my life to be stunningly, crazily, stupidly complex.
265
266YOU MIGHT LIKE
267
268The Crucial First Step to Reaching Your Goals (That Most People Skip) READ 
269I too have yearned for a simpler existence, a metaphorical cabin in the woods away from the pressures of modern life. I have downsized and minimized both my physical and emotional needs.
270
271But I look at greatness and I wonder if the greatest thinkers and innovators would have amassed their influence had they tampered down their desire, their ambition, their hunger for something larger than simple pleasures.
272
273Minimalism and the embracing of simple pleasures has permeated our current culture, and I get it. I understand the rejection of mass consumption. I understand the need for minimalism and simplicity, to encourage others to question their consumptive habits. But I find that too much minimalism is paradoxically too much of a good thing.
274
275I think it's completely OK to want things, to chase after experiences beyond sitting in nature staring at a tree. For example, I think being in nature is wonderful, but it's not going to satisfy a hunger for a Big Life. I love the idea of purging your possessions, but I don't love the idea of shaming others because they want to experience physical success. Perhaps minimalism is a great ground zero to begin again from, but I am hesitant about staying there, about building a home in small desires.
276
277Minimalist Living: young woman looking out of train window
278When minimalism and the pursuit of simple turns into a weird competition of who can want the least, the point has been missed. Since when did it become trendy to tamp down desire to the lowest amount possible?
279
280In my experience, downsizing my ambition, wants, needs, and desires has always been a product of fear. The lower my expectations, the less room for disappointment, failure, and struggle. If I can make my wants small enough to achieve them with ease, then I will never suffer.
281
282I will also never strive, achieve, or impact.
283
284That's a dangerous game to play with yourself, because what seems virtuous can also seem a lot like making yourself small enough to bow down to fear. While I am against blind consumption, I am also against the idea that we should make our lives as small as possible, to never strive, to stop dreaming of impact and change.
285
286Giving up on high expectations looks an awful lot like giving up on yourself.
287
288Because the truth is that it's scary to dream. It's scary to risk disappointment and failure and the possibility of finding out that your dream may not be your future. But we all inherently understand that great things usually are born from great risk. If we are given just one life, why would we ever want to make our wants and desires and needs so small? Why would we want to simplify ourselves down when we can live in the messy and beautiful world of complexity?
289
290I understand the desire to simplify, and it seems legitimate. It seems like a good idea to stop striving and to be present enough to enjoy what is now and happening and here. I do not advocate that anyone trade on their present misery for a future payoff. But I don't know that present gratefulness should ever cause complacency.
291
292This world does not need more mindless consumption... But we do need more hope, more people brazen enough to believe that there is always more work that needs to be done to bring a better world.
293
294While I thought simplicity and less expectations and less desire would bring me more gratefulness, all it really did was leave me nothing to look forward to, nothing at all ahead in my life to work toward. Life is long, and dreams keep you alive and purposeful. Simplifying my life down to being grateful for just the smallest things improved my state of mind in some ways, but overall brought me a sense that no future joy was available. That if this is the best there is, then why keep going? Why do nothing but maintain?
295
296Yet we are not built for maintenance. If we were, our world would not have progressed. We would not be innovating or improving. We would simply be existing. This world does not need more mindless consumption, that is for sure. But we do need more hope, more people brazen enough to believe that there is always more impact, more work that needs to be done to bring a better world.
297
298Make your wants small if that's your desire. But if it's out of fear, that's a slippery slope. Because if you're trying to fit yourself into a smaller life in order to avoid the risk of trying, then how satisfied can you really be? If the pursuit of simplicity is born from a panicked need for easy, then I would reassess. Is that what you want from your one life? To want less in order to try less?
299
300This post originally appeared on Medium and was republished with the author's permission. Jamie Varon is a writer based in Los Angeles.
301
302=================================
303
304The Case Against Minimalism
305   Posted On: November 4, 2013  |    Posted In: Millennials  |     Posted by: Broke Millennial®
306
307
308
309Or in other words, Why I Am Not a Minimalist
310
311If you were to walk through my front door at this moment you would immediately assume one of two things. One, I had recently been robbed or two, I take the minimalism mantra to heart. Well, you know what they say about assuming. While my sparsely furnished apartment, with no TV stand and stools for side tables, appears minimalist, I may be one of the few personal finance bloggers who will actively speak out against the wave of minimalism that has taken root.
312
313You may be thinking, if I don’t have much “stuff” how can I claim to buck the minimalist trend? I say so because my lifestyle goals are not aligned with the minimalism agenda.
314
315The reason I don’t have much “stuff” is because my mother gave me the sage advice to be able to pack all my belongings into the back of a car until I’m ready to settle down. While I still embrace my nomadic spirit, I keep moving costs down my combating the natural inclination to “nest” in my apartment. My mother also told me not to waste my money on junk furniture and instead slowly build up possessions with quality purchases that will last decades, if not a lifetime. Instead of sinking my greenbacks into the money-pit that is Ikea furniture, I’m subscribing to her wisdom.
316
317Many of those who joined the minimalism march will lecture about cutting out anything that isn’t an absolute necessity, rejecting products purely because of their convenience, constantly combating your desire the indulge and to view splurge as a four-letter word.
318
319To me, this advice is only practical to a select few who feel innately called to transcend earthly possessions, instead of providing realistic advice for those of us who practice the unholy acts of indulging in life’s consumer-oriented pleasures.
320
321Perhaps some will seek to revoke my personal finance blogger status, but I enjoy getting an occasional manicure and find value in paying for my eyebrows to be professionally waxed. Do I search for deals and use customer loyalty cards and coupons to get the best deals? Absolutely. Do I find it worth the $230 a year it costs for me to have these indulgences. Yes.
322
323There are people who will genuinely be content living in a small cottage, on a self-sustained farm in the middle-of-nowhere. This woman isn’t one of them. Just as it’s irrational for me to pitch my lifestyle ideals to a sparse-living hippie in Washington, he (or she) can’t expect me to give up the the lifestyle goals I strive to achieve.
324
325Living a small-town life is not appealing to me as a lifestyle, and as I prefer to live in major cities I will incur a far greater cost of living than those who appreciate the charm of knowing most of your neighbors.
326
327Some of the minimalists out there use the tactic to achieve their version of financial independence or early retirement. There is of course nothing wrong with either goal and there are two ways to achieve both — spend less or earn more. Clearly, a lot of people agree with the spend less mentality.
328
329However, early retirement shackles you to a certain way of living.
330
331For those who have embraced minimalism and plan to never live in an area with a high cost of living, it’s possible to raise a family on $40,000 to $80,000. For those of us who dream of owning property in a major city, sending children to private schools and of going on excursions around the world that don’t involve hostels, $80,000 a year is an unrealistic amount of money to raise a family on.
332
333Granted, there are those who mean more of a “career shift” when they say retire early. Instead of a complete absence of income, they would rather not have to rely on the steady paycheck from a 9-to-5. They’ll still generate revenue through passion projects or a small business.
334
335If my version of the American dream is to own a plantation home on acres of land, stay in five star hotels when I travel and use wealth to make a change in my community, then I’ll be motivated to make the financial moves to enable my dream comes true. Even if my dream means having a career and not retiring in a decade at the ripe-young-age of 34. Luckily for me, I’m also early in my career with no children or husband to factor into my decisions. I can make career changes, find a place I’m happy working, or start a business without a drastic impact on another person’s life.
336
337Minimalist may say I’m a slave to consumerism because I dream about certain expensive items, but as long as I’m generating the income to buy what I want without incurring any debt or hindering my (hypothetical) family’s future, no one is in a position to judge how I choose to spend my money.
338
339For newer readers, it is important to note that I have no debt. I made my college decision based on graduating debt free and thus don’t carry any student loans. I live in New York City as a renter, so there isn’t a mortgage payment I need to factor into my budget. I recognize this does give me a distinct advantage when it comes to not living a minimalist lifestyle.
340
341To that end, minimalists and I do agree on one point: one should not go into debt, nor dig deeper into the red to “Keep up with the Jonses.”
342
343To those who practice and preach minimalism, I do respect your dedication to a difficult lifestyle choice. To those who crave the “finer things” in life, there is at least one personal-finance-oriented blogger who understands and supports your choice. But do understand wanting expensive, luxury items does come at the cost of hard work, a dedication to saving, investing, making tough decisions, staying out of debt and prioritizing what is truly worth your money.
344
345And let the spirited debate begin in the comment section!
346
347======================
348
349The Case Against Minimalism
350   Posted On: November 4, 2013  |    Posted In: Millennials  |     Posted by: Broke Millennial®
351
352
353
354Or in other words, Why I Am Not a Minimalist
355
356If you were to walk through my front door at this moment you would immediately assume one of two things. One, I had recently been robbed or two, I take the minimalism mantra to heart. Well, you know what they say about assuming. While my sparsely furnished apartment, with no TV stand and stools for side tables, appears minimalist, I may be one of the few personal finance bloggers who will actively speak out against the wave of minimalism that has taken root.
357
358You may be thinking, if I don’t have much “stuff” how can I claim to buck the minimalist trend? I say so because my lifestyle goals are not aligned with the minimalism agenda.
359
360The reason I don’t have much “stuff” is because my mother gave me the sage advice to be able to pack all my belongings into the back of a car until I’m ready to settle down. While I still embrace my nomadic spirit, I keep moving costs down my combating the natural inclination to “nest” in my apartment. My mother also told me not to waste my money on junk furniture and instead slowly build up possessions with quality purchases that will last decades, if not a lifetime. Instead of sinking my greenbacks into the money-pit that is Ikea furniture, I’m subscribing to her wisdom.
361
362Many of those who joined the minimalism march will lecture about cutting out anything that isn’t an absolute necessity, rejecting products purely because of their convenience, constantly combating your desire the indulge and to view splurge as a four-letter word.
363
364To me, this advice is only practical to a select few who feel innately called to transcend earthly possessions, instead of providing realistic advice for those of us who practice the unholy acts of indulging in life’s consumer-oriented pleasures.
365
366Perhaps some will seek to revoke my personal finance blogger status, but I enjoy getting an occasional manicure and find value in paying for my eyebrows to be professionally waxed. Do I search for deals and use customer loyalty cards and coupons to get the best deals? Absolutely. Do I find it worth the $230 a year it costs for me to have these indulgences. Yes.
367
368There are people who will genuinely be content living in a small cottage, on a self-sustained farm in the middle-of-nowhere. This woman isn’t one of them. Just as it’s irrational for me to pitch my lifestyle ideals to a sparse-living hippie in Washington, he (or she) can’t expect me to give up the the lifestyle goals I strive to achieve.
369
370Living a small-town life is not appealing to me as a lifestyle, and as I prefer to live in major cities I will incur a far greater cost of living than those who appreciate the charm of knowing most of your neighbors.
371
372Some of the minimalists out there use the tactic to achieve their version of financial independence or early retirement. There is of course nothing wrong with either goal and there are two ways to achieve both — spend less or earn more. Clearly, a lot of people agree with the spend less mentality.
373
374However, early retirement shackles you to a certain way of living.
375
376For those who have embraced minimalism and plan to never live in an area with a high cost of living, it’s possible to raise a family on $40,000 to $80,000. For those of us who dream of owning property in a major city, sending children to private schools and of going on excursions around the world that don’t involve hostels, $80,000 a year is an unrealistic amount of money to raise a family on.
377
378Granted, there are those who mean more of a “career shift” when they say retire early. Instead of a complete absence of income, they would rather not have to rely on the steady paycheck from a 9-to-5. They’ll still generate revenue through passion projects or a small business.
379
380If my version of the American dream is to own a plantation home on acres of land, stay in five star hotels when I travel and use wealth to make a change in my community, then I’ll be motivated to make the financial moves to enable my dream comes true. Even if my dream means having a career and not retiring in a decade at the ripe-young-age of 34. Luckily for me, I’m also early in my career with no children or husband to factor into my decisions. I can make career changes, find a place I’m happy working, or start a business without a drastic impact on another person’s life.
381
382Minimalist may say I’m a slave to consumerism because I dream about certain expensive items, but as long as I’m generating the income to buy what I want without incurring any debt or hindering my (hypothetical) family’s future, no one is in a position to judge how I choose to spend my money.
383
384For newer readers, it is important to note that I have no debt. I made my college decision based on graduating debt free and thus don’t carry any student loans. I live in New York City as a renter, so there isn’t a mortgage payment I need to factor into my budget. I recognize this does give me a distinct advantage when it comes to not living a minimalist lifestyle.
385
386To that end, minimalists and I do agree on one point: one should not go into debt, nor dig deeper into the red to “Keep up with the Jonses.”
387
388To those who practice and preach minimalism, I do respect your dedication to a difficult lifestyle choice. To those who crave the “finer things” in life, there is at least one personal-finance-oriented blogger who understands and supports your choice. But do understand wanting expensive, luxury items does come at the cost of hard work, a dedication to saving, investing, making tough decisions, staying out of debt and prioritizing what is truly worth your money.
389
390And let the spirited debate begin in the comment section!
391=============
392
393Minimalism: another boring product wealthy people can buy
394Minimalism is just another form of conspicuous consumption, a way of saying to the world: ‘Look at me! Look at all of the things I have refused to buy!’
395
396Chelsea Fagan for the Financial Diet
397
398 @chelsea_fagan
399Sat 4 Mar 2017 12.00 GMT Last modified on Fri 24 Mar 2017 18.38 GMT
400 Minimalism is now a secular kind of religion.
401I hate minimalism.
402
403I hate it as the incredibly tedious piece of personal performance art it has come to be in our society, but I also hate it as an aesthetic: your white-on-white-on-white life and meticulously crafted wardrobe of only the most wispy products Everlane and Aritzia have to offer are, frankly, a saltine cracker’s idea of what a Cool Girl would wear.
404
405In terms of its visual merits, or as a capital-S style, the hyper-curated minimalism really only conveys one thing: “I wanted to take the very safest route to chic, cut away every possible misstep or risk. I saw the French Girl Chic articles and I was like … that’s pretty damn homogenous, but smoking tests poorly in focus groups and those occasional striped shirts are too bold. Time to reduce my look even further until literally every item I purchase tells people ‘I could get something more interesting, but I have enough money to choose not to’.”
406
407Because let’s be clear about what the minimalist aesthetic, at least as a personal style choice, actually is: it’s a way of aping the connotations of simplicity and even, to a degree, asceticism, without actually having to give up those sweet, sweet class signifiers.
408
409
410Being minimalist in this way – “Stop wasting money on all that IKEA nonsense! With this $4,000 dining table hand-whittled by a failed novelist in Scandinavia, you will never need another piece of furniture!” – really just means having enough upfront disposable money to “invest” in your wardrobe and surroundings. Reducing a wardrobe down to a few painfully elegant cashmere-cotton blend tops is only really possible if you can put down at least $1,000 in one go for the creation of your “capsule wardrobe”.
411
412The visual cues and undercurrents of moral superiority it apes, the “no-makeup makeup” because you’ve bought $250 worth of nigh-invisible Glossier products, the vaguely Japanese home decor because we assume literally anything that isn’t crowded with color and pattern is somehow automatically Japanese – it’s all about spending an incredible amount of time and attention to look as if you hadn’t thought about it at all.
413
414And these are all fine things! You are allowed to enjoy having precisely 10 sweaters in slightly different shades of taupe, or meticulously keeping your all-white dining set on white open shelves, despite the fact that it clearly implies at least once-weekly dusting of your entire kitchen, but what is #problematic about it is pretending that this is somehow a noble or morally positive way to spend your money.
415
416It is just another form of conspicuous consumption, a way of saying to the world: “Look at me! Look at all of the things I have refused to buy, and the incredibly-expensive, sparse items I have deemed worthy instead!”
417
418
419And we are entitled to buy whatever we like, but to pretend that the intentional and costly upfront implications of a minimalist-chic life are anything but privileged posturing is ridiculous. But I believe that we feel these things because the minimalism-as-luxury-good phenomenon is extremely caught up with the minimalism-as-faux-spiritualism phenomenon, which is its own can of farm-to-table, artisanal worms.
420
421Long story short, the past 10 years or so has sold us one of the most oddly logical, yet no less cloying, answers to our hyper-consumerist late capitalism: minimalism as a secular kind of religion, an add-on to the cultures of yoga and green juices and general living well by putting together a tapas platter of cultural and spiritual practices without ever fully committing to one.
422
423The premise of minimalism in this way is very vague, and ever-shifting to accommodate the tastes and stomach for consistency of the individual practitioner, but the overall theory is the same: by paring your life down as actively as possible, you are almost guaranteed to appreciate what remains more, and are likely to pick up some serious wisdom in the process, which usually makes for excellent self-serious Medium content down the road.
424
425There are a million variations – fitting all your belongings into a single box, small-house or van living, radical de-cluttering, extreme purges of technology or social activity, etc – but they all hold the same vague, usually unspoken level of superiority.
426
427
428They all imply that they are in some way a moral upgrade from the life of “mindless consumerism”, and as a bonus, allow you to take on some of the desirable aesthetics and morality of poverty without ever having to be poor. You’re not homeless, you’re on the road, doing some chic van-living and following the good weather! You’re not unable to afford basic home goods, you’re choosing to pare everything down to a single cardboard box! If life were a video game – and there are some scientists who seem to believe it may be – minimalist spirituality is a great way to get all the gold coins of poverty without ever having to be one of those icky poor people.
429
430The implication of this kind of minimalism is obvious, and yet it somehow never seems to get addressed: the only people who can “practice” minimalism in any meaningful way are people upon whom it isn’t forced by financial or logistical circumstances.
431
432You cannot choose to “declutter” if you are already living in a sparse home you cannot afford to furnish. You cannot “reduce” the food you consume if you are already only able to put one good meal on the table per day. And when nearly half of Americans would be unable to pay their bills if they missed a single check, this “forced minimalism” is much, much more common than we would like to imagine. We cannot pretend that performative reduction in consumption, or choosing to only consume in certain ways, is not one of the most gratuitous displays of privilege out there, and to frame it as in any way a moral choice is more than a little offensive.
433
434
435But the truth is that, as with so many other social phenomena that insufferable white dudes have co-opted, this spiritual minimalism has essentially become yet another competition for who can be the best at whatever you’ve chosen, even if that “whatever” is literally “having less shit”.
436
437Even ignoring the class angles, this idea that any “decluttering” in your life is automatically a positive thing is simply an aesthetic choice being reframed as a moral one because, let’s be honest, it’s really easy to look at a lot of what (mostly) women own as being totally frivolous. Makeup, more-elaborate wardrobes, cozy home decor, art, supplies for hobbies, nice home goods – it’s not a coincidence that most of the stuff we’re being told to flush away from our lives happens to be stuff that women mostly accumulate.
438
439And, yes, there is a very strong capitalist-critical argument to be made about buying in more intentional and ethical ways, but color me shocked that very few of these minimalist troubadours ever really take things to an economic or class-based argument. It’s about reducing for personal enlightenment and pompous blog posts, it’s not about arguing for a more equitable society in which people consume proportionate to their needs. (If you need a perfect example of this, note the fetishization of the curated “simplicity” of the ultra-rich: their clean loft spaces, their designer capsule wardrobes, their elaborately reduced diets. These people are still conspicuously consuming in mind-boggling ways, they’re just filtering it through the convenient prism of simplicity, and that allows their million-dollar wardrobes to somehow be aspirational for someone advocating for “minimalism”.)
440
441The point is, the points being made by the minimalism crew are neither truly spiritual nor truly socioeconomic. They’re another style, as superficial as anything else that might come down the runway at Fashion Week, just with an added layer of condescension. At the end of the day, we shouldn’t kid ourselves: this kind of “minimalism” is just another boring product that wealthy people can buy.
442
443This piece was originally published on The Financial Diet
444
445========================
446
447Against Minimalism
448Brian Miller
449August 13, 2014
450My house, and my room in particular, is cluttered with things.
451
452I have too much stuff by any standard, and it would seem that I could improve my life and learn a lesson in frugality by embracing the philosophy of minimalism. Minimalism is touted as a way of breaking free from consumerism and learning to live with less. On its face, no one could disagree that our society is in need of developing such habits. However, as the Art of Manliness recently wrote, minimalism is largely only for those who are already rich. If one reads through articles at The Atlantic or New York Times, in which people testify about minimalism changing their life, you will quickly see that the common denominator is wealth—often young wealth—and lives spent accumulating meaningless things.
453
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455These people are certainly in need of some sort of conversion, but mere division and subtraction of material possessions cannot be the final answer. The problem is not that there are too many things, but too many meaningless things and no meaningful things. There are some things that have meaning, even if they are redundant, and this is why minimalism would never apply to someone like me.
456
457There are a hundred things, which I may not need in the strictest sense, cluttering up my room. Things I could live without, just as I could live on soylent paste without all the ritual we put into preparing our meals. Most minimalists try to make exceptions for books and things that have family connections, but in my house that category encompasses most everything.
458
459On my desk is a wood book podium, hand made by my great-uncle. He still makes them to this day. Its only practical purpose is to hold a collection of papers that I’m currently pondering. The same job could be accomplished in much less space with a file-tray from Office Depot.
460
461On the opposite corner of my desk is a mason jar that I stole from my grandmother’s house, half filled with coins. It reminds me of the larger one filled with pennies that used to sit in the corner of the third bedroom at my grandparent’s house, and of the story involving a mason-jar, a broken gas pump, and my embarrassed uncle who loves to re-tell the story at every family gathering.
462
463Keep Ethika Politika free and beautiful with a $2/mo gift
464Open my desk and there are old note pads and letters, full of thoughts and memories. Some of those thoughts are better than others. Some of those memories are better than others. But they are all there. There are multiple pairs of sunglasses. The gold ray-ban aviators that my dad gave to me. The Steve McQueen replica Persols my mother knew that I wanted and had saved up for.
465
466There are at least half a dozen pocket-knives. The minimalist would have me throw all but one, or maybe even all, away. But how would I decide? There is the first swiss-army knife I was given and remember bragging about to my younger cousins. The two blade Old-Timer just like my Papa used to carry. I used to never leave the house without it. The K-bar that I’ve taken on many hikes. Which memory to discard?
467
468On the wall hangs the .22 rifle I was given on my 13th Christmas, as is tradition in the South. Above it is the Mossberg Shotgun I was given before going off to college. Beneath that gun sits a bookshelf. On the bottom shelf is a humidor, usually empty, but occasionally filled with Rocky Patel or Romeo y Julietas. Many a good conversation has sprung from that magic box. Behind it is an old cigar box filled with match-boxes, lighters, pipe tobacco, a corncob pipe, cigar cutters, lighter fluid, and everything else you need for late-night talks with good friends. Besides the Bourbon, of course, which is downstairs.
469
470On the other side of the room is a dresser. On it sits a palm cross that has remained there since Palm Sunday. Next to that is a bust of Aristotle and an empty bottle of 2005 Chateauneuf du Pape. It was my first bottle of what would become my favorite wine. It was imbibed with good friends in a New York hotel room off Times Square. You can still smell the soil of Southern France in the bottle.
471
472Behind that is a bowl filled with corks, or rather, of memories. If the humidor incensed many a conversation, the bowl is proof that they were also well oiled. Bourbon, Scotch, Wine, cheap and expensive, good and awful, all there. Mixed in with the corks are a few match-boxes from Little Taste of Cuba, a cigar shop in Princeton, to which friends and I went every day for two weeks in the summer of 2013. After that we would stop at the wine shop and buy a few bottles of Chateau Recougne. I remember that name because a torn label from one of the bottles remains pressed between the pages in my Book of Common Prayer.
473
474I’ve never been of much use in the kitchen, and most of my belongings there could probably afford to be lost anyway. I have too many coffee mugs, for one thing. But then again I drink too much coffee. There is the Elvis mug I bought on a trip with my grandmother. The Branson Missouri mug I bought when my grandfather took me there. A few years later he would die there. But there it is, still in my kitchen.
475
476In the living room is a stack of DVDs. I could probably do away with them all now and find them on Netflix or some other site or venue. But even these movies have memories. When she left I tried to throw out all the memories of her, but I never succeeded. White Christmas was the first movie watched together, and years later I found a love letter she had etched on the inside cover. She’s gone. The memory is still there.
477
478All throughout the house are random piles of books. So many books. The shelves and tables that are stacked with them could probably all be replaced by a Kindle, I suppose, if reading were only about the words on the page. But the hard volumes have character. The margins are marked, both by me and by previous generations of owners. There are the notes of the priest who used to own my copy of the Summa Theologica. There is still the odor of a previous owner’s cigarettes rising from the pages of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity. Then there are the bibles. Yes, the Kindle store has my beloved King James, but not these. On top sits a black-leather bound Old Scofield study bible. I hardly believe a word of the dispensationalist propaganda found in its notes, but it is part of my heritage still. It’s the same study bible my dad had on his desk, and that my Papa had on his. Beneath that is my first Bible: a blue leather-bound volume I used to carry to Sunday school. Next to these is an old Jerusalem Bible. A gem—not available on the Kindle store—that J.R.R. Tolkien helped to translate.
479
480All other books sit in piles of seemingly chaotic order; yet there is an order. Cicero and Burke belong together. As do Roger Scruton and John Paul II. Eliot is the antidote to Camus. And John Henry Newman has more in common with John Wesley than most would realize. A room without books is like a body without a soul. Having a kindle might clean the place up a bit, but the soul of this house would follow the books.
481
482I could go on. “Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets,” G.K. Chesterton mused. “But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.” Minimalism only makes sense once we accept certain modern assumptions: Chiefly, that things do not have any intrinsic meaning. For the modern man who lives without meaningful things, minimalism makes perfect sense. It makes no difference whether we live with a thousand things or a hundred things if all of them are meaningless. Modern man’s greatest problem is not that he has acquired too many things, but that he has discarded all the meaningful things and the spiritual depth needed to appreciate them.  For those who strive to surround their lives with things that cannot be reduced to numbers, the minimalist proposition is at first perplexing, and then abhorrent.
483
484We should strive to cut down on the meaningless things in our lives, but unless we replace them with something meaningful, such reduction will be a Sisyphean task.
485
486==============================
487
488Minimalism is a lifestyle/movement that’s been around for centuries, and waxes and wanes as part of the cultural zeitgeist. Several years ago it resurfaced in a big way. Blogs about being zen and simple living rocketed up in popularity, and people started taking the “100 Thing Challenge.”
489
490Minimalism has even been touted a couple times on this very blog, and I really like the idea of it as a whole. There is something very inspiring about living Spartanly, and there are some definite benefits to doing so. It helps you not get caught up in the consumerism trap, and keeping your life free of excess stuff unburdens your mind from that weight, allows you to be mobile and travel light, and helps you save money and focus on that which is really valuable.
491
492But, it’s one of those things that can be taken too far. Despite a desire I sometimes get to embrace minimalism wholly, there have always been a few things that have made me uncomfortable about it:
493
494Strict minimalism is largely for the well-off…
495What first got me thinking more critically about minimalism was an article I read a few years back in the New York Times, which begins thusly:
496
497I LIVE in a 420-square-foot studio. I sleep in a bed that folds down from the wall. I have six dress shirts. I have 10 shallow bowls that I use for salads and main dishes. When people come over for dinner, I pull out my extendable dining room table. I don’t have a single CD or DVD and I have 10 percent of the books I once did.
498
499The author of the piece, Graham Hill, then goes on to explain how his current lifestyle is a big departure from how he had formerly carried on. Having come into a huge windfall after selling an internet start-up in the 90s, Hill indulged in big-ticket purchases and found his life inundated with stuff. That all changed when he fell in love with a woman from Andorra, and he packed his possessions in a backpack to follow her around the world. By traveling light, he was able to reevaluate his relationship with mere stuff, and now intentionally lives “small.”
500
501I both enjoyed Hill’s story and felt bugged by it, and I couldn’t figure out the reason for my latter reaction until I came across a little essay by Charlie Lloyd:
502
503Wealth is not a number of dollars. It is not a number of material possessions. It’s having options and the ability to take on risk.
504
505If you see someone on the street dressed like a middle-class person (say, in clean jeans and a striped shirt), how do you know whether they’re lower middle class or upper middle class? I think one of the best indicators is how much they’re carrying.
506
507Lately I’ve been mostly on the lower end of middle class (although I’m kind of unusual along a couple axes). I think about this when I have to deal with my backpack, which is considered déclassé in places like art museums. My backpack has my three-year-old laptop. Because it’s three years old, the battery doesn’t last long and I also carry my power supply. It has my paper and pens, in case I want to write or draw, which is rarely. It has a cable to charge my old phone. It has gum and sometimes a snack. Sunscreen and a water bottle in summer. A raincoat and gloves in winter. Maybe a book in case I get bored.
508
509If I were rich, I would carry a MacBook Air, an iPad mini as a reader, and my wallet. My wallet would serve as everything else that’s in my backpack now. Go out on the street and look, and I bet you’ll see that the richer people are carrying less.
510
511As with carrying, so with owning in general. Poor people don’t have clutter because they’re too dumb to see the virtue of living simply; they have it to reduce risk.
512
513When rich people present the idea that they’ve learned to live lightly as a paradoxical insight, they have the idea of wealth backwards. You can only have that kind of lightness through wealth.
514
515If you buy food in bulk, you need a big fridge. If you can’t afford to replace all the appliances in your house, you need several junk drawers. If you can’t afford car repairs, you might need a half-gutted second car of a similar model up on blocks, where certain people will make fun of it and call you trailer trash.
516
517Please, if you are rich, stop explaining the idea of freedom from stuff as if it’s a trick that even you have somehow mastered.
518
519The only way to own very little and be safe is to be rich.
520
521Basically, minimalism is largely something only well-off people can afford to pursue, because their wealth provides a cushion of safety. If they get rid of something, and then need it later, they’ll just buy it again. They don’t need to carry much else besides a wallet when they’re out and about; if they need something, they’ll just buy it on the fly. No sweat. If you’re not so well-off, however, having duplicates of your possessions can be necessary, even if such back-ups ruin the aesthetics of owning just 100 possessions. 
522
523…and philosopher bachelors.
524It is true that there have been exceptions to this rule throughout history — men who have been both intentionally poor and dedicated minimalists. They simply do not care for possessions, or what will happen to their bodies if they lose them; if they have to live on the street and beg for their supper, so be it. Certainly there is something inspiring about this kind of commitment, but it comes with a couple caveats.
525
526First, these men have almost invariably been bachelors – philosophers, monks, spiritual teachers, and the like. Still today, the vast majority of lifestyle design gurus and minimalist converts are men without children.
527
528Now people can debate all the day long about whether this is perhaps the way every man should go – holding on to the freedom to do whatever you’d like, indefinitely. But for those who are immovable in the conviction that family constitutes the greatest happiness in life, strict minimalism becomes, if not impossible, then highly undesirable. I could have my children sleep in a cardboard box and use a twig as a teething toy, but there are a good number of accouterments that make rearing one’s rugrats infinitely easier.
529
530Second, the ranks of even history’s most supposedly hardiest minimalists are fewer in number than legend might have us believe. For just one example, Henry David Thoreau is often looked to as the high priest of minimalism (“Simplify, simplify, simplify!”). While he did indeed live sparsely while at Walden Pond (though his family often brought him meals), he spent most of the remainder of his life occupying the attic of his parents’ comfortable, well-appointed home! He enjoyed quite the safety net. So too, he amassed a large collection of both books and natural specimens that cluttered his living quarters, and he took much joy in these collections.
531
532Minimalism still makes stuff the focus of your life!
533The great irony of minimalism is that while it purports to free you from a focus on stuff, it still makes stuff the focus of your life! The materialist concentrates on how to accumulate things, while the minimalist concentrates on how to get rid of those things…ultimately they’re both centering their thoughts on stuff. It’s like a compulsive overeater and a bulimic. One thoroughly enjoys eating, and stuffs his face whenever and wherever he can. The other eats, hates himself for eating, and then purges it out. But they’re both obsessed with food. The satisfying “high” one gets from decluttering has always struck me as a little unsettling (though I experience it myself!); you accumulate stuff, and then revel in purging it out of your life, only to quite often repeat the cycle once more. What a weird First World phenomena.
534
535A Moderate Minimalism
536teddy theodore roosevelt at desk working piled high with books papers
537
538As I said at the beginning, I think minimalism is a great thing, just not when taken to extremes. A man should have a healthy relationship with his possessions, and that means getting into the right mindset about them, and then not thinking about them very much at all. Most of the great men I admire from history knew what they needed and enjoyed (check out their libraries and studies). They accumulated things that were both practical and simply brought them pleasure. They bought things that were well-made and wouldn’t have to be replaced over and over. They didn’t hoard or surround themselves with junk. They didn’t go overboard and stretch their budget to keep up with the Joneses. And they didn’t have to make a philosophy on stuff central to their lives, because they had too much else going on to need it. They didn’t have time to worry if 103 possessions might be too many, if their huge library of books should be reduced, if their studio full of art supplies was too cluttered, or if a room dedicated to hunting trophies might be weighing down their psyche. But they were minimalists where it mattered: in paring down the time-wasters and soul-suckers that would hold them back from creating a rich, manly legacy.
539
540===========================
541
542That reminds me of the AirBnB minimalists. The ones who travel around the world bouncing from house to house. It's amusing watching their videos about how they only own 20 items but they're sitting in someone else's house, filled with items the minimalist probably uses daily. But since it's not their house, nothing in it counts
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544permalink embedsave parentgive gold
545
546[–]Mia_la
547 116 points 1 year ago 
548Yeah, that's never sat well with me. Seems dishonest somehow.
549
550Like that American guy who deliberately flew into Peru (I think?) with no money as an "experiment" to prove how nice the world was. Deliberately ignored all travel warnings and didn't even bring an emergency fund or a map, just stranded himself in a developing nation without any means of supporting himself. Expected the locals to feed and shelter him. If Peruvian people tried that in the USA there'd be hell to pay, Trump would build a wall, all sorts of shit would go down.
551
552Sure, makes sense. The issue I have with the bloggers themselves is what they say just seems disingenuous. It's not totally honest if you're bragging about how you "only own X items" when you're just using everyone else's stuff.
553
554Same with weirdo traveler - it would be dishonest to say he traveled without any costs. He sponged off other people and cost THEM money, just because he didn't spend any money personally, doesn't meant there wasn't a cost incurred to someone. He did mention briefly the farms you can stay at where food and lodging are supplied in return for labour which makes a lot more sense to me.
555
556-------------------
557
558Minimalism is a theme that gets recurring attention in the personal finance blogosphere. It’s a fun idea, isn’t it? By limiting your possessions, you can afford a smaller, cheaper home. Fewer items means fewer things that require maintenance and repair, saving you more money. And of course, there is that much more money in your pocket for not having bought it in the first place. And the stuff you have can be converted to cash when you sell it in your embrace of minimalism. Who wouldn’t want to become a minimalist in the face of all that savings and extra income?
559
560Well, me for one.
561
562I’m not claiming that all of the advantages claimed by the minimalists don’t exist. If you can stomach minimalism, those advantages are real. Except for when they aren’t. Besides, it takes a certain kind of person to be a minimalist, and I am simply not one. Minimalism has a financial and emotional cost that few realize. So before you consider minimalism for yourself, read this monster 2000 word post first. 🙂
563
564When minimalism costs more money
565There have been bouts of my life when I have been a forced minimalist. Living in the motel, my wife and I had a week’s worth of clothing each, toiletries, my e-reader, the laptop and a George Foreman grill. Everything else was packed away in storage.
566
567Everything. All of the DVDs, all the books, the gaming consoles, the charger for my reader (oops), all of my kitchenwares, and all of my tools. When the weather got unexpectedly warm for January, I was stuck in my heavy winter coat.
568
569Minimalism vs Entertainment
570Not having all of my usual entertainment options made going out to the movies very tempting. If were weren’t pretty much flat broke at the time, we probably would have seen a couple first-run movies at the local theater. Two tickets, popcorn, and a soda comes up to nearly $20. With all the spare time on our hands and cool movies coming out in that two-week period, we probably would have seen three.
571
572Meanwhile a new DVD costs $20 or even less depending on where you get it and when. And unlike that first release movie, you can watch it again and again for free.
573
574For a more apples-to-apples comparison, minimalists argue that you should simply rent movies from Redbox or Netflix instead of buying them. Unlike a rental, you can watch a DVD you own at a moment’s notice. Last week, I popped in the Robin Williams movie, RV. It had come up in conversation a few days earlier and I was thinking about it. I can’t even guess where I could have rented a 5-year-old release these days.
575
576Video Games
577
578There is a service called GameFly which is the Netflix of video games. The idea is that you rent games instead of buy them, return them when you are done and not worry about low buy-back prices. I see this as the more expensive option. Ever take so long to return a rented DVD that you could have bought it with the late fees? I once let a Netflix disk sit on my desk for two months. Oops.
579
580Modern video games are long. I mean, really long. Dragon Age: Origins has over 100 hours of game play. When I played through it the first time, only had about 5 hours per week to devote to it. It took me nearly 5 months to complete. At rental prices, I would have spent more on the game then I did buying it.
581
582Minimalism vs Food
583My kitchen is packed with pots, pans, plates, bowls, cups, bakeware, glassware, stoneware, flatware, mixers, blenders, and choppers. There are very few kitchen tools that I want to own but don’t already. Mostly, I would really like more of stuff I already own. Especially the flatware; a 40 piece set doesn’t last very long in a house with 4 people!
584
585In the motel room, I could make grilled cheese sandwiches. That was about it. In 13 days, we ate out 6 times. That is one of the reasons we were broke, because I couldn’t make actual meals.
586
587What about minimalism in a real kitchen? Here’s the thing, there isn’t much in my kitchen that doesn’t get used pretty frequently. Do I really need 3 sauté pans? Probably not, but then it would take me 2 hours to make my Mexican Medley breakfast skillet meal. Less flatware or cups? Well what that really means is more washing dishes. As it is, I’m averaging about 4 loads every 3 days. If I had less stuff, I’m sure there would be days I was washing the same pan three times in a 24 hour period. I don’t think all that extra hot water, dish soap, and electricity when using the dishwasher is frugal.
588
589Minimalism vs Tools
590There are some people who don’t own any tools. When driving to Colorado, I met a woman with a flat tire and no jack. I actually crossed 4 lanes of interstate highway to help her. I’m glad I could help her because we were in the middle of no-where. It would have taken hours for someone she called to reach her.
591
592I really don’t understand how people survive without tools. I certainly can’t live that way. I own three tool boxes with an assortment of wrenches, screwdrivers, hammers, and other gear. When something breaks, I probably have the tool to fix it. And now, thanks to the events of that motel stay, I have another set of some of the more common tools in the trunk of my car as well.
593
594The car repair
595
596About a week into our temporary homelessness, the EGR valve decided it wasn’t going to wait another week for me to have access to my tools and a garage. For those who are unaware, the EGR valve recirculates car exhaust into the engine to increase fuel efficiency. It operates via a vacuum hose to open and close the valve. If that valve doesn’t close when the engine speed drops to an idle, you are going to stall out. In 3 miles that day, I stalled out 12 times.
597
598So, I replaced the EGR valve in the motel parking lot. Which required me to buy the tools so I could do it. And when I realized that I needed a socket extension after I had the thing half apart? I had to walk 3 miles to Walmart to get another one. I finished by street-light that night.
599
600Because I didn’t have access to my tool kit, that car repair took me an extra 2 1/2 hours. Of course, I could have taken the car to the mechanic and paid $90 for labor.
601
602The ladder
603
604One tool I don’t have is a ladder. I really do need to remedy that. I had to borrow a ladder to climb on top of the mobile home to retrieve the satellite dish. Then I had to rent one from Home Depot to get onto the higher roof of this place to install it. Renting a ladder was certainly a lot cheaper than paying DirecTV’s moving fees.
605
606I’ll be borrowing the ladder again to mount the bike hook in the garage so my roommate can finally park his car inside. Eventually the smoke detector mounted at the peak of the vaulted ceiling in the living room is going to need a new battery. I really hope I have my own ladder by then, because if that sucker starts beeping at 3am, I’m not going to be able to find a ladder at that hour.
607
608If renting a ladder costs $14 for 4 hours, and buying one costs $100, the purchase has paid for itself by the 8th time you use it. Meanwhile, constantly borrowing a ladder costs relationship capital. Every time I borrow it, I drain that capital a little more until I become the guy who is too cheap to buy his own stuff and constantly has to borrow yours.
609
610Not having something is only cheaper until you need it.
611
612The emotional cost of minimalism
613Minimalists argue that you should pack stuff away and if you don’t get it out again within a month, you should get rid of it. Of course, this ignores problems like the fact that I don’t wear shorts in February or long-johns in August.
614
615But ignoring seasonality, not everything that is important to me requires constant attention. When was the last time you flipped through your photo album. It was actually 2 months ago when I was packing, but before that, probably about a year. But I wouldn’t part with those photos. Likewise, I have shirts that I haven’t worn in years. But each one bears a significant memory. I have thought about getting rid of them from time to time, but I just can’t bring myself to it. Each time I pull out a shirt to put in the Good Will bag, I am transported back to college, high school, middle school and the emotional highs and lows I experienced wearing that shirt.
616
617Should you be emotional about your processions?
618I belong to a group called Under 30 Professionals. I’m not under 30 anymore, but I’m grandfathered in. 🙂 One of the founders, David Spinks, can usually be trusted to say some insightful things in the discussion. When the topic of minimalism came up, he had this to say:
619
620Things are only bad for you if you feel an emotional connection to them or they take a big time commitment to maintain compared to their value to your life/happiness. If you can part with that stuff easily, then it’s not a huge deal.
621
622This goes to the heart of my problem with minimalism. I disagree that things are bad for you if you feel an emotional connection to them. I would say that they are bad for you if you don’t. Of course, David lost most of his stuff to Hurricane Sandy last year, so he may be coming at it from the perspective of a forced minimalist.
623
624But later in the discussion, other pro-minimalism comments echoed the idea that emotional attachment is antithetical to minimalism. It seems that the core of minimalism is having a zen-like disengagement from the material world. They believe that we shouldn’t have emotions for items, and anything with no emotional or practical purpose is unnecessary.
625
626I guess that is where minimalists and I agree. Possessions with no purpose in your life have no purpose being in your life. I just disagree with the definition of “necessary.”
627
628I believe that emotions are necessary. And I see nothing wrong to having feelings for certain items.
629
630On the importance of memories
631Martin, from Studenomics, likes to say YOLO, you only live once. That phrase means different things for different people, but to me it means you only have a finite amount of time on this Earth. Lifestyle designers and minimalists would say that you should eschew everything that limits you from forming a relentless march of new memories.
632
633I want a quality over quantity for my memories. A few strong, life-altering memories are more important to me than a torrent of lesser experiences. Which is the prouder accomplishment, the greater memory, the person who has hiked a fourteener, or the person who has hiked so many that he can’t remember them all? I say the former. And to encourage the retention and strength of those memories, physical triggers are important.
634
635I remember a comedian once talking about breakups. She commented that when you first break up, everything reminds you of that person. Go to the grocery store, “Lettuce! We used to eat lettuce!”
636
637That is the strength of triggers.Shortly after an experience, anything and everything can be a trigger, but after years pass, only certain, poignant items will trigger a memory.
638
639I used to have an image of a rubber chicken as my blog header. That rubber chicken is a totem representing all of my summers at boy scout camp. 17 years later, what would remind me in “300 days of sunshine” northern Colorado of the trip where it rained the entire week and I formed the “Order of the Webbed Foot” to raise the spirits of the younger scouts if not a little rubber bird? What would recall the week where we stole the emblem of the waterfront, a larger rubber chicken, every single night?
640
641I say, hold onto and cherish your memories. And hold onto the stuff that triggers them.
642
643=================================
644
645“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
646Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
647― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play
648
649====================================
650
651MINIMALISM VS. FRUGALITY (AND WHY IT MATTERS)
652September 4 By Natalie Bacon27 Comments This post contains affiliate links. Read the disclosure policy.
653
654Minimalism vs Frugality
655
656I’ve recently got into minimalism, and I’m kind of obsessed. It fits my personality and natural tendency to want to purge and live on less.
657
658However, I wasn’t sure how different minimalism was from frugality until I started distinguishing the two. After a little research, including finding this post by the Money Boss, I knew I was on to something that needed to be talked about more.
659
660Minimalism and frugal living are totally different concepts as it turns out.
661
662One is about 1) wanting to own less stuff and the other is about 2) spending less money on stuff.
663
664This distinction gives me clarity and helps me focus and make better decisions around money and stuff.
665
666 
667
668FRUGAL LIVING – WHAT IS IT?
669Frugal living is a way of life that focuses on getting the best bang for your buck. It’s about being thrifty with your money, like using coupons and finding the best deals and sales. People who are frugal focus on spending less.
670
671It’s not uncommon for frugal people to own a lot of stuff that they got on sale or for a good price.
672
673Example of a frugal person shopping: “I bought 3 new pairs of shoes on sale at half price. All the shoes are average quality but they were cheap.”
674
675An argument against frugal living is that it focuses only on getting the best deal. Frugal living can lead to a lot of clutter and stuff you don’t need and find yourself attached to unnecessarily so.
676
677Long-time readers know that I am not naturally frugal. Not at all. But I adhere to different frugal habits because I know they help me spend less and save more.
678
679If you want to be more frugal, check out these posts:
680
681The Ultimate Guide To Frugal Living
68275 Ways To Save Money
683How To Radically Reduce Your Expenses
684The Top 10 Habits Of Frugal People
685You can also download the Budget Spreadsheet Bundle to access my budget spreadsheets.
686
687 
688
689WHAT’S DEAL WITH MINIMALISM THEN?
690Minimalism, on the other hand, is a way of life that focuses on owning fewer things. Minimalists want to own a few, high quality items that improve their lives – and they don’t mind spending a few extra bucks for it.
691
692The focus of minimalism is on improving the quality of life by owning fewer items. It’s about escaping excess and clutter and focusing on what really matters in life (i.e.: not stuff).
693
694Example of a minimalist shopping: “I bought 1 pair of new running shoes that will improve the quality of my runs because of the increased performance enhancers. They were expensive. They are my only pair of running shoes.”
695
696An argument against minimalism is that it’s boring and just something wealthy people are currently into. (Here’s a post against minimalism I think is interesting.)
697
698At heart, I am a minimalist. I’m constantly purging my stuff. I’m not attached to it at all. The thought of more stuff makes me cringe. I don’t mind spending an extra buck for higher quality.
699
700If you’re interested in minimalism, read this post about Minimalism, Money, and My Clothes. You can also sign up for a free email course to get started simplifying your life and prioritizing what matters most to you in 5 Day Goal Setting Bootcamp.
701
702 
703
704CAN YOU BE BOTH?
705The sections above show you how different minimalism and frugal living are from one another.
706
707But they’re not exclusive. You can be a minimalist and frugal.
708
709The frugal-minimalist (as I’ll call her) is the ultimate powerhouse. She wants to spend less when she buys something (frugal), and she wants to own fewer items (minimalist). She cares about quality, but won’t over pay for it. Her dollar means so much to her that she refuses to overspend. She also has a distaste for clutter and is simple at her core.
710
711The frugal-minimalist is basically a unicorn. She’s nearly perfect with her spending, saving, and owning. Hashtag goals.
712
713It may be impossible to be this perfect, but we can try and fight against our natural urges, whether to spend more or own more!
714
715 
716
717HOW TO BE MORE FRUGAL AND MORE OF A MINIMALIST
718Since I don’t want this post to be all about theory, I want to give you actionable steps to get started with frugal living and minimalism, too.
719
720Here are 10 ways you can be more frugal and minimalist right now.
721
722To be more frugal…
723
724Never buy full price.
725Shop at discount and thrift stores.
726Sign up for deal sites.
727Use coupons.
728Buy second-hand.
729Always live below your means.
730Buy in bulk from wholesale stores.
731Call utility or cable companies to try to get a better deal.
732Surround yourself with frugal-minded people.
733Read frugal blogs!
734To be more of a minimalist…
735
736Donate or sell anything you haven’t worn in one year.
737Get rid of all the clutter in your home.
738Spend money on experiences, not things.
739Start saying “no” to things you don’t want to do.
740Prioritize your life and set goals so you live intentionally, with purpose.
741Simplify every area of your life.
742Remove emotional attachments to things.
743Decide what makes you happy internally, and pursue that.
744Get around people who like minimalism.
745Read minimalist blogs (I love Becoming Minimalist).
746 
747
748A FINAL NOTE!
749Frugal living and minimalism are two different mindsets.
750
751The former focuses on spending less and getting the best deal but doesn’t pay much attention to quality or quantity. The latter focuses on owning fewer things and living simply, with a focus on quality and not much focus on price.
752
753You can be both a minimalist and frugal, but you may find one comes more naturally to you (I am more of a minimalist at heart).
754
755Either way, both these concepts can help you live more intentionally and be happier in the long run.
756
757=================================
758
759	
760For upper-middle class Americans drowning in stuff, a message of simplicity might sound appealing. But for the poor, advice about streamlining an already bare-bones existence rings hollow.
761
762Joshua Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, two self-styled gurus of minimalism, have popularized the idea of earning less and having less through their books — the two are currently on a 100-city book tour — and a blog that draws an audience of 2 million readers. They say their message of making life more meaningful with fewer possessions is one to which everyone can relate, no matter their financial status.
763
764“You have the luxury of options right now,” Millburn said.
765
766When he walked away from a six-figure job because he was disillusioned following a divorce and his mother’s death, “My initial plan was to write fiction … and to work at a coffee shop,” he said. “I radically pared down my bills to make a part-time living … but everything I did was in line with my values.”
767
768Millburn said that he and Nicodemus both grew up poor in Ohio, and that he spent two years cutting his expenses to whittle away at most of his credit card and other debt before embarking on his lifestyle change.
769
770“I think we all have options,” he said. “I spent a few years changing my life and paying off about 80 percent of my debt and sacrificing,” he said. “I moved into a very tiny apartment.”
771
772
773Joshua Fields Millburn, right, and Ryan Nicodemus are The Minimalists, writing about living a meaningful life with less stuff. via The Minimalists
774That advice might sound off-key for those in poverty.
775
776“A wealthy person minimalizing is making a lifestyle choice,” said Sasha Abramsky, a fellow at advocacy group DEMOS and author of “The American Way of Poverty, How the Other Half Still Lives.” Poor people, he said, “don’t have that option in the first place.”
777
778Through their public relations representative, the two declined to say how much they earned from preaching a gospel of fewer possessions and less money. “Focusing primarily on money misses the point,” Millburn said via email.
779
780Even poor Americans can benefit from disciplined spending, Millburn insisted. “I think ultimately it’s about decisions with the resources we do have …. I think people don’t realize how much is going out the window.”
781
782Not so, said Arne Kalleberg, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies poverty.
783
784“The poor people I’ve talked to, they know exactly how much money is going out the window because they’re counting pennies,” he said. “They know exactly which bills they’re going to not pay this month and how much they’ll pay in interest. That doesn’t mean poor people don’t waste money — every time you want to wash a pair of jeans, you have to pay $3 — but they do know where the money goes.”
785
786“As long as the big-picture inequalities remain, a conversation about minimalism … is going to end up blaming poor people when they stay poor.”
787
788In a blog post, Millburn wrote, “I’m currently wearing a $100 pair of jeans, and, yes, they are worth $100 of my freedom to me; they are also my only pair of jeans, ergo I get immense value from them since I wear them almost every day.”
789
790If you’re a middle-class person with a washer and a dryer in your house, that’s easy, Kalleberg said. Trips to a Laundromat cost both time and money.
791
792And for the people who can’t afford $100 jeans, perhaps they can have the cast-offs of elective minimalists.
793
794Nicodemus said that at one point, he had roughly a dozen shirts he wore when he painted. “I probably only needed one or two painting shirts, if that,” he said.
795
796“I think that’s the nice thing about a lot of different charities. There are places now within communities … that have high-quality stuff,” Millburn said, saying he donated a lot of his clothes when he embraced minimalism.
797
798“I’m certain I can go to Goodwill ... if I was in a lower income situation [and] have free or very low-cost access to high quality goods.”
799
800But there’s nothing generous about telling poor people they should be grateful for hand-me-downs, Abramsky argued.
801
802“It’s one thing for a wealthy person to say, ‘I don’t need that pair of jeans,’ but the psychology of telling a poor person, ‘you’re not good enough to buy new clothes’… psychologically, that comes with a lot of baggage,” he said.
803
804Minimalism also assumes a certain amount of free time, which poverty experts say is as scarce as disposable income for poor Americans.
805
806“I would say that for me I know that I have at least 20 minutes a day to sit and let my mind wander and do a little bit of meditation,” Nicodemus said.
807
808Others can, too, he said. “They can find at least 20 minutes a day…. They can certainly slow down a little bit and make better decisions here and there.”
809
810It’s not that simple, Kalleberg said. “Poverty comes with tremendous time restrictions,” he said. “With the psychological pressure of juggling … everything becomes stressful and everything generally takes longer than it would if you had resources.”
811
812Ultimately, the problem of applying minimalism to everyone is that “it assumes everything is equal,” Abramsky said. It assumes poor people live in neighborhoods that are as safe as rich neighborhoods, that they have access to good grocery stores and doctor’s offices and parks and schools — and almost always, this isn’t the case.
813
814“It makes all of these assumptions about equal environments that don’t hold,” Abramsky said. “As long as the big-picture inequalities remain, a conversation about minimalism … is going to end up blaming poor people when they stay poor.” 
815
816==========================
817
818“The art of losing isn’t hard to master” begins Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art,” which goes on to demonstrate just how hard the art of losing is to master. Phrases repeat, so every time you think an idea is gone, it resurfaces. The writer comes off as someone so boxed in by hoarded memories that she’d need an intervention to clear them all out.
819
820 Katy Waldman
821KATY WALDMAN
822Katy Waldman is a Slate staff writer.
823
824She should probably call Graham Hill.
825
826In a recent essay in the New York Times Sunday Review, the founder of Treehugger.com—and master of the art of losing—describes his transformation from ardent consumer to modern Spartan. It’s a kind of riches-to-rags tale, with a dose of enlightenment thrown in. After he sold his Internet company for millions in the late 1990s, Hill reports, he went on a shopping binge, purchasing homes, cars, gadgets—even hiring a personal shopper named Seven. But his avid materialism failed to flower into happiness. After touring for a time through Barcelona, Bangkok, Buenos Aires, and Toronto with “Olga, an Andorran beauty,” he downsized to a 420-square-foot studio. Now, “I sleep in a bed that folds down from the wall,” he writes. “I have six dress shirts. I have 10 shallow bowls that I use for salads and main dishes.” (It is not difficult to imagine Hill eating a lot of salads.) “I don’t have a single CD or DVD and I have 10 percent of the books I once did.” In sum: “My space is small. My life is big.”
827
828Your tone is smug, a reader might be tempted to add. After the article ran, Slate’s email network lit up with irritation. People applauded the message, especially the commitment to living lightly on the land—but wished all manner of woes (nonorganic lettuces? Irradiated GMOs? Unseasonably warm winters?) upon the messenger. And it wasn’t just the hipper-than-thou details that grated, but the sense that Hill was writing from a socioeconomic blind spot. Didn’t he realize that minimalism might prove, well, expensive? Owning the one übergadget that obviates the need for everything else in your pockets is a luxury. So is dumping out the contents of your junk drawers because, should the need arise for X, you can always go out and buy it. You don’t need duct tape handy if a repairman can finesse that temperamental door hinge for you. A clear-eyed Tumblr post by Charlie Lloyd put it best: “Poor people don’t have clutter because they’re too dumb to see the virtue of living simply; they have it to reduce risk.” 
829
830At the same time, though, Hill has a point. There are plenty of people who amass belongings not because they have to, but because they want to. (The snob effect in economics is an extreme example: It describes situations in which people desire expensive goods because of their higher price tags.) There are those who live in McMansions, cram their garages with unused electronics, glut their closets with clothes. Such conspicuous consumption—and its accompanying waste—not only seems obnoxious, but it can imply unmet psychic needs. In his article, Hill cites studies linking “the consumer mindset” with “negative affect and social disengagement.” (Hill’s quibbles with the consumer mindset do not mean he eschews stuff per se. He promotes, even fetishizes, gadgets and furniture—a portable induction cook top, a “high end futon”—in his lifestyle blog Lifeedited.com. And his ceramic Greek cup business churns out exactly the kind of charming tchotchkes that would likely end up on the trash piles of other would-be minimalists.)
831
832The crusade against excess gets at the suspicion, present everywhere from The Great Gatsby to the movie Wall Street, that most purchases are just “fragments shored up against [our] ruins,” petitions to a void that won’t be filled. As a movement, minimalism has roots in the spiritual asceticism of Zen, Jain, and early Christian philosophies, in Gandhi and John the Baptist, as well as in Greek Epicureanism, which promoted a doctrine of simple living. It’s been practiced by luminaries from Tolstoy to Henry David Thoreau to Gary Snyder. In 1936, the American scholar Richard Gregg coined the term “voluntary simplicity” to describe a lifestyle purged of the inessential. His ideas gained new life in 2007, when the San Francisco entrepreneur Dave Bruno launched the 100 Thing Challenge. Bruno pledged to reduce his earthly possessions to just 100 items. As he blogged about his quest for freedom from consumerism, others took note. A campaign was born. Today, minimalism continues to gain traction, especially in green culture and online, where a circle of blogs and discussion forums spreads the gospel “Own less. Live more.”
833
834Hill’s essay is not the first simple-living manifesto to appear in the New York Times. In 2006, the paper ran a story on Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, the founder of Apartment Therapy, who at the time lived with his wife, Kate, and their infant daughter, Ursula, in “a 265-square-foot, one-bedroom rental on Bedford Street in the West Village.” The decision to renovate the tiny space during Kate’s pregnancy, rather than move someplace larger, “was influenced by Mr. Gillingham-Ryan’s role as founder and guiding spirit” of Apartment Therapy. That site “favors modernist rooms with an inviting but decidedly simple look … efficient rooms in which acquisition is carefully considered, and splurges are held in abeyance,” the article said. To remain comfortable in their squeezed digs, the couple exchanged a full-size refrigerator for an under-the-counter model and allowed in the living room a “single piece of upholstered furniture”—a rocking chair. They shared one closet. “It helps to keep your life well-edited,” Kate Gillingham-Ryan told the paper, using language eerily predictive of Hill’s.
835
836But can stuff really be dispensed with so easily? Especially as you acquire a spouse and/or children, is minimalism (to borrow another of the movement’s favorite words) sustainable?
837
838It depends. Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan is now divorced and shares custody of Ursula. After the 265-square-footer, he lived in a 480-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment, but it grew too small, so he recently moved to “a two-bedroom a little farther away.” In June, in an article titled “Tree by Tree, Yurt by Yurt” and subtitled “In East Hampton, the founder of Apartment Therapy learns from his design mistakes,” he shows reporter Elaine Louie around his family’s 18-acre property. He’s helped decorate a barn, six yurts, and a two-story house. Louie summarizes Gillingham-Ryan’s new aesthetic: “More important than perfection … is a home that feels expansive and approachable. And luxurious … it creates a feeling of abundance.” What about minimalism, its streamlined, utilitarian elegance? Well, Gillingham-Ryan told Louie, “people love restaurants because the kitchens are practical and simple.” But even better is the “sense of plenty: lots of wine, lots of candles.”  
839
840Or take Everett Bogue, another seeming apostate from the minimalist church. According to his e-book, “The Art of Being Minimalist,” which is no longer available online, Bogue had an epiphany in 2009 that led him to quit his New York job, sell his possessions, and wander around the world. Yet after three years of living out of one bag (and feverishly blogging about his experiences), Bogue had had enough. “Fuck Minimalism,” he wrote in a valedictory post on his blog, Beyond the Stars. (The blog has since been deleted.) “Minimalism was cool for a while. Now, it’s simply the echo of a revolution that once was.” Though a lively chorus of minimalist writers begged to differ, many granted that their practice of the art was less extreme than Bogue’s. “The next time someone tells you to throw everything away, laugh,” instructed one such blogger. “You know the wisdom of moderation.”
841
842Moderation is a watchword for Dave Bruno, inventor of the 100 Thing Challenge. These days, Bruno lives in California with his wife, three children, and “about 130 to 140 personal items,” he says. He’s no longer practicing the challenge, but its lessons remain: He finds himself less reliant on shopping to relieve stress. He takes walks, gardens, spends time with his family. Bruno prefers the term simple living to minimalism, because he thinks you can own a fair number of items and still adhere to the philosophy—as might an artist with an extensive supply of paints. For him, simple living is about “refusing the consumer culture that tells us we won’t be happy or satisfied unless we continually get stuff.”
843
844Though Bruno’s wife and kids didn’t participate in the challenge and do not consider themselves minimalists, he says it wasn’t too difficult for him to pare down his routine. (He acknowledges that objects shared among family members, like a kitchen table, don’t count toward his total number of possessions.) He is determined to live “a normal life, with a normal job and a normal suburban house. If you shadowed me for a day, there’s nothing about my existence that would seem super minimalist,” he explains. Does he ever relapse? Not often, but “last Christmas, I bought supplies to do lino-cuts, which are like wood carvings made of linoleum,” he admits. “I fell into the idea that if I buy the stuff, I’ll do the thing that I want to do.”
845
846Stuff, it turns out, is pretty easy to defend. It can be useful. It can be evocative. It can embody, as one colleague phrased it, “memories and pacts and connections.” Ancient gods and goddesses had accoutrements that symbolized their power: Mercury carried a wand. Poseidon bore a trident. Demeter hauled around wreaths and fruit. “No ideas but in things,” insisted William Carlos Williams, voicing the mantra of the Imagists (not to mention Snooki and the Kardashians).
847
848As for Bishop’s poem, “One Art” is a villanelle, the poetic form most suited to addicts because of the way its repeated lines enact a relapse. It’s the poetic form most suited to hoarders because it never lets anything go. There are exceptions like Dave Bruno, but for most of us, the things we try to lose keep returning to haunt us.
849
850All of which is to say: Graham Hill, I’ve got my fingers crossed for you. I hope you can lead “a bigger, better, richer life with less.” But if you can’t, and you wind up backsliding into clutter along with the rest of us, that’s no disaster
851
852========================
853
854It was also a deeply religious response, despite me having mostly ditched the faith a few years prior.
855
856"There's a really strong Christian aspect to anti-consumerism and simple living: that man is fallen, that we are too worldly, too materialist and need to return to some Eden to re-establish grace," notes Leigh Phillips, author of Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff, in an interview with VICE.
857
858This is a serious problem. Look, I don't care if you're religious: you do you. The issue for me is that this ancient ascetic ethos—the notion that we have to consume far less in order to refine our souls and save the world—continues to grow in cultural clout.
859
860And it's anti-poor and reactionary bullshit.
861
862Bemoaning people who live paycheque-to-paycheque—which, according to a 2016 study, is 48 per cent of all working Canadians—to be more disciplined and attentive lets the very rich and powerful in society off the hook. It blames the masses for "living beyond their means" when it's a select few—like, literally a few—who are hoarding the money and control and obstructing society from rapidly transitioning to a just and sustainable future.
863
864Yet glowing examples of asceticism-as-solution are just everywhere.
865
866There's the painfully bougie and oft-ridiculed magazine Kinfolk, birthed out of a Brigham Young University dorm room and featuring the cringey tagline "in praise of slowness." Or the so-called Minimalists, a pair of white dudes who travel the world to proclaim the joys of simplicity, and just happen to be close friends with evangelical legend Rob Bell.
867
868
869(Usually left unacknowledged by such folks is that "slow" and "simple" stuff tends to be considerably more expensive and time-consuming than buying shit at, say, Walmart or Tim Hortons. Both of the Minimalists previously had six-figure jobs; the founder of Kinfolk worked at Goldman Sachs.)
870
871It also doesn't seem like much of a coincidence that a key figure in David Foster Wallace's final novel, A Pale King—which was obsessed with grand notions of sacrifice and civic virtue and paying attention, a foil of sorts to Wallace's indictment of entertainment in Infinite Jest—was a Jesuit priest who taught the incredibly dull discipline of tax accounting.
872
873Nor that the even less tolerable Father John Misty had Macaulay Culkin "crucified" by Ronald McDonald clowns in a recent music video for "Total Entertainment Forever," ending up as some hamfisted, No Logo-inspired mess about corporations and technology and sacrilege that only a guy who ranted at a festival crowd for 20 minutes about the banality of entertainment before storming off stage would ever feel comfortable delivering.
874
875Sure, some such trends aren't explicitly religious.
876
877There's the somehow still-running Adbusters, the "tiny home" movement, third-wave coffee shops and endless books about the smartphone-induced permadeath of real-world discourse and silence. Or the socially acceptable practice to shame people who shop on Black Friday, despite the fact it might be the one time in the year they can afford to indulge in something nice for themselves or their kids.
878
879All of these reflect the same skepticism of possessions and pleasure and even modernity, viewing them as a degradation of morals and virtue.
880
881Joona Salminen, an expert in early Christian asceticism at Finland's University of Helsinki, said in an interview with VICE that starting in the fourth century, people striving for religious perfection tended to leave the city for the monastery in the desert. There was a clear demarcation: the urban centres housed food, wealth, possessions, family, parties and sex, whereas the Desert Fathers (as they were known) prioritized citizenship of heaven via fasting, celibacy and manual labour.
882
883By far the wildest story from this era was Simeon Stylites the Elder, who spent 37 years praying and fasting on top of a 50-foot pillar in the Syrian desert.
884
885The emphasis on strict asceticism waned over time, especially following the Protestant Reformation (which famously elevated faith over acts). But the very clear line drawn between worldly pleasures and heavenly treasures never really dissipated, carried on by the likes of Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, Shane Claiborne and "plain people" like Amish, Hutterites and Mennonites.
886
887"We're not always fully aware of how the context of many important intellectual things in our Western thinking is indebted to an ascetic environment," Salminen says.
888
889It's an idea that's taken on even more prescience with the looming reality of climate change. The idea goes that there are too many people on the planet. Cities are too consumptive. We have to get back to the land, live simply so others can simply live, remember that small is beautiful. In other words, our only way of dodging catastrophic wildfires and flooding and droughts is to clamp down and stop using so much shit.
890
891Here's reality: wages for workers have stagnated for decades. Income inequality has widened. Jobs have become more precarious—especially for young people—while the cost of living skyrockets.
892
893Meanwhile, a handful of multi-billionaires have expanded their grip on the world's wealth, largely via rapacious sectors like finance, real estate and fossil fuel production; as identified by Oxfam in early 2017, a mere eight men now possess the same amount of wealth as 3.5 billion people. In the same study, it was found that Canada's two richest businessmen have the same amount of wealth as the country's 11 million poorest people.
894
895And it's not like the average worker is responsible for climate change.
896
897The world's militaries emit more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other sector. Air travel—which was controversially excluded from the Paris Agreement, along with shipping—is disproportionately used by high-income people. As calculated in a 2011 study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the richest quintile of Canadians emit almost double the annual emissions than the poorest.
898
899Sure, we can probably all cut back on eating factory-farmed meat. Some elements of our day-to-day lifestyles should probably be revamped, with high-speed rail maybe replacing cars, renewables and nuclear power displacing fossil fuels.
900
901But minimalism isn't going to get us out of this mess. As Kyle Chayka in the New York Times pointed out, the trend provides "further ways to serve our impulse to consume more, not less."
902
903Rather, we should be aiming much higher, for a far more technologically advanced and sustainable society. The anti-anti-consumerism, really.
904
905What we need is to demand proportionate wealth and power to call the shots, to accelerate progress and development that benefits everyone, especially for oppressed groups like black, Indigenous and people of colour, migrants and LGBTQ people.
906
907"We can have a conversation over whether the current suite of products that are made in society are the optimal suite of products," Phillips suggests. "And that's an interesting conversation. But if we're simply saying that people should consume less, then we're actively endorsing that Thatcherite, neoliberal transformation of the last 40 years where we have seen working people are consuming less."
908
909I ended up abandoning my ascetic lifestyle after moving into a house with roommates. Part of it was the awkwardness of washing one's clothes in the bathtub with other people around.
910
911A bigger factor was me simply giving up on the possibility of change: I'd spent much of those literally dark months reading books about overpopulation and the negative impacts of the internet on attention spans and memory, and had become convinced that The Masses were too dull and stupefied to change their ways.
912
913It was pompous and intellectually lazy, something I only realized after spending a long while researching writing about energy and technology issues.
914
915But the solutions are out there. They'll just require a lot of collaboration to deploy; retreating into the desert and placing the blame on working people is reactionary nonsense that only allows megalomaniacs like Trump to get away with annihilating the globe.
916
917What we need is to demand proportionate wealth and power to call the shots, to accelerate progress and development that benefits everyone, especially for oppressed groups like black, Indigenous and people of colour, migrants and LGBTQ people. To shoot high, dreaming of green affordable housing for all, and access to cheap and nutritious food, and plenty of time to fuck around on our PS4s or even have "simple" and "slow" picnics in the park with our Christian pals.
918
919Hell, even if it doesn't work, it sure sounds more fun than freezing my ass off in a tiny bachelor suite.
920
921===========================
922
923Flat Design Is Going Too Far
924on February 27, 2014 / by Oliver McGough
925
926Flat Design was the design trend of 2013. Momentum is showing no sign of slowing as more and more sites jump onto the idyllic san serif bandwagon.
927
928With so much going for it, it’s perhaps justified that Flat design stands as the design trend of the minute. So, you ask, why do I think flat design may have gone too far?
929
930It is hard to argue a case against it. Flat design brings with it everything that is appropriate for the modern web. Simple, minimalist web pages. This simpleness translating to a medium that is relatively easy to implement. The use of low contrasting colour pallets are easy on the eye. Sans serif fonts creating a feel of cleanliness.The removal of the ‘bells and whistles’ leaves us only what is important: Colour, Shape and Content. A presentation method which is effective at being both minimalist and beautiful. And with the rise of mobile computing, minimalism is a key advantage. Reducing the stress on low power systems.
931
932
933
934Net Magazine recently released nominations for their annual Net Awards. The chief prize going to agency of the year. Looking at the sites in question, it is difficult to argue Flat Design has taken the world by storm (See here for an album of the nominees, provided by Reddit user awkwwward).
935
936However, this also raised some of the major issues I have with Flat Design. These are the best in the business, yet they encapsulate my 3 major pet peeves with the Flat World:
937
938Extreme Minimalism
939The ethos of flat design is to implement ‘Swiss Style’ design philosophy onto the web. A philosophy that places heavy emphasis on minimalism amongst other things. Don’t get me wrong, minimalism has it’s uses. It has served to tidy up, and condense sites. Cleaning them, creating a user friendly atmosphere. In the meantime, also reducing stress on lower power devices, such as mobile, by creating simplistic web pages.
940
941Minimalism is a fine line however. It is all too easy to overstep the line where minimalism becomes a featureless site.
942
943
944(Source: Mark Boulton Design)
945
946We begin with an example from Mark Boulton Design. A renowned web design studio, and a Net Award nominee. You’d expect them to be showcasing their talent on their own site. Instead we are presented with an ultra-minimalist spectacle. Creativity seems lacking. Flat, boring colours with basic text explaining what they do. It may be enough to fulfil its purpose, but does little to inspire us with their talents.
947
948That is not to say this extreme minimalism doesn’t have it’s place, Google has done it for over a decade. It just has to be in the correct context. I don’t think a web design agency, where creativity is key, quite fits that.
949
950Mobile First Design, Taken too Literally.
951The great, if not the greatest, selling point of flat design is its accommodation for mobile devices. With over 28% of web traffic now mobile, only a fool would not ensure their site was optimised as such. Flat design’s previously mentioned minimalism drops intense graphics, and process-heavy items. Favouring a clean and basic design.
952
953This is all great. Many designers however, seem to forget about the medium on which the majority of the web is still consumed. The humble PC.
954
955
956(Windows 8’s Metro UI)
957
958Windows 8 is the obvious example. Microsoft attempted to create a uniform experience across all devices. Utilising their ‘Metro’ interface on Mobile, Tablet, Xbox and of course PC. Metro had shown great success on Mobile, Tablet, and Xbox, and the eventual movement to PC was an inevitability.
959
960An inevitability met with much disdain – you either love it, or you hate it. With hidden off screen gestures, and on screen gestures more suited to fingers than a mouse, Windows 8 provides a usability nightmare for any new user, or experienced user. The clunky Metro ‘Start screen’, ‘Apps’ obviously designed for tablet with little or no regard for PC, oversized text, amongst many other wrong doings.
961
962All of these apply to many modern websites, designed to offer a ubiquitous experience over all devices. Unfortunately, if that experience appears far superior on one device over another, why handicap it – especially if it is your largest market? The user has to be first.
963
964Fear of Breaking From Normality
965Flat design has seen so much success of late, everyone is desperate to jump on the bandwagon, or risk being left behind. We’re at a stage where if your site isn’t flat, you’re not keeping up with web standards. You’re living in the dark ages. Your site is a failure.
966
967It is no surprise then, that everyone is jumping on – joining in. With the redesign goldrush constrained by relatively strict rules on what Flat Design is, combined with other current web trends, we’re seeing a huge rise in generically designed sites. Designers appear scared to do something different – at risk of not being current. This schoolgirl mentality is stifling creativity and innovation. We are seeing people play it safe in order to conform. Why change when everyone expects, and seems happy with flat design?
968
969
970
971(Sources:Teehan+Lax, Meta Lab Design)
972
973The two sites above are again nominees for thenetawards’ top prize. Two top web design agencies we would expect to be forging a creative path. Yet everything is so generic, so similar. These near-identical sites have nothing to do with one-another, other than being in the same industry. Yet the placement of elements is identical in both, down to menu options and company name/logo. Even the background image has stark similarities.
974
975The scramble to conform only serves to turn each site into a template to be ever so slightly customized for the site it belongs to. Is this really what we want – a generic web?
976
977Will Flat Design’s Popularity be Its Downfall?
978Flat design has become the template for budding websites. We’ve seen it feature in a plethora of flattened redesigns of late (The New York Times, iOS 7, Flickr). There is no denying that great flat design really is great. That flat design certainly fulfils problems with ubiquitousness and touch interaction found in older styles.
979
980The issue with flat design is that it has become too powerful. We’re at a stage where creativity is being stifled in preference of sticking to a template that ‘works’. Where sites are becoming generic, sites are conforming. Usability is being sacrificed because… flat design works right?
981
982We’ve covered the issue of whether flat design is here to stay before. I’d certainly agree that its principles will have a lasting impression on the web and elsewhere. It has certainly been a welcome change from the messy skeumorphisms of the past. It just feels as if the internet has lost it’s ‘Wow Factor’. I’m becoming tired of being confronted by the same template site after site. It feels as if every designer is being handed a set of 8-10 WordPress templates to deal with, and adapting sufficiently.
983
984Where’s the creativity gone, and when will it return?
985
986===============================
987
988Let’s imagine for a second you go into a restaurant. You order a cheeseburger, and after waiting for a while, someone comes out and serves you a Lunchables version of a cheeseburger: two Ritz Crackers, a patty of Velveeta, and a swollen puck of saline-injected roast beef. You wouldn’t say, “What a clever deconstruction!” or “How deliriously evocative of a cheeseburger!” You’d be like, “Where the fuck is my cheeseburger?”
989
990The seemingly inexhaustible trend of reducing everything into series of twee minimalist posters is the design equivalent of the Lunchables cheeseburger. Minimalist posters are a bait-and-switch: a lack of nuance disguising itself as insight. Bad, lazy design retconned into spartanly applied technique. The single olfactory note of a fart masquerading as a seven-course banquet.
991
992No one can deny that the minimalist poster trend has flourished on the Internet. Hell, we’re part of the problem. In just the past couple years, Co.Design has published stories about minimalist posters for famous movies, Hollywood architecture, economic principles, philosophical ideas, Bible verses, and mental disorders.
993
994Minimalist posters are encouraging us to be design idiots.
995The problem: Minimalist posters are encouraging us to be design idiots. A central tenet of good design is that it shouldn’t be any more complicated than it needs to be, but that doesn’t mean good design is inherently uncomplicated. Great design should have nuance, not strip it all away until it has been emptied of meaning. Done right, minimalist posters can help us gain new insight into complicated subjects, by bring a single aspect or theme into razor-sharp focus. But they rarely do, because that sort of focus is difficult for any but the most talented designers to attain. And forget about insight. Can you even tell me what these minimalist posters are meant to represent without me telling you?
996
997
998Of course you can’t. If you care, they’re “minimalist posters” for Raiders of the Lost Ark, anarchism, gender identity disorder, and Return of the Jedi, and each and every one of them was posted on countless blogs (including Co.Design, facepalm), despite the fact that they are the graphic design equivalents of Rorschach tests: assortments of simple shapes so inherently devoid of content that someone else has to tell you what they see in order for them to make sense.
999
1000Breaking something down is supposed to amplify its essence, not eliminate it entirely.
1001There’s a scene in the The Simpsons where Homer and Lisa are watching a stand-up comic tell a joke. When the comic reaches the punchline, Homer is puzzled, and Lisa tries to explain the joke to him, to no avail. Exasperated, she says: “It’s just a joke, Dad” at which point he starts laughing uproariously, saying: “Oh, I get it! I get jokes.”
1002
1003
1004These sorts of minimalist posters, they’re the “I get jokes!” of graphic design. They’re just empty-headed references to bigger, better, and more challenging things. All too rarely, a good one comes along that makes us think twice, and there are graphic designers out there who consistently do minimalist posters well, like Olly Moss–which is why Hollywood pays him to do them. More often than not, though, minimalist posters are just trivial capsules designed to trigger an automatic stimulus-response mechanism in our brain: “Oh, minimalism! I get minimalism!” Except if you love a lot of these posters? You really don’t get the point of minimalism at all. Whether you’re talking about the stories of Raymond Carver, the music of Philip Glass, or the art of Donald Judd, minimalism is about breaking something down in order to amplify its essence. But it damn well isn’t about removing that essence entirely.
1005
1006=====================
1007
1008t’s design vocabulary time! We know you’ve heard these two terms floating around: skeuomorphism and flat design. What do they mean? They’re two contemporary designs trends that each have their own unique style and set of traits. Skeuomorphism creates a sense of familiarity by emulating materials, while flat design stays true to its medium, often feeling minimal and utilitarian.
1009
1010These opposing styles create a major fork in the road for designers (especially those in UI design), and many projects begin with the question of which world to jump into. Luckily, we’re here to help answer that question with an in-depth look at each design style. We’ll also explore Google’s all-new design language, Material Design, which combines the aesthetic of both skeuomorphism and flat design.
1011
1012Skeuomorphism
1013—
1014The term “skeuomorph” comes from the Greek: “skéuos” (meaning container or tool) and “morphḗ” (meaning shape). So, what does it mean to contain a shape? Let’s look to the culture that the term skeuomorph came from.
1015
1016sk1
1017Notice the repetitive cubes which ornament the seams of this Greek structure. These cubes (known as dentils) were placed there to create the illusion of wooden rafters that were used to support the roof in old buildings.
1018
1019Because buildings in Greece were made out of wood before marble, we can speculate that architects may have been trying to contain or emulate a shape that was familiar. Imitating wood in marble structures may have helped invite people to use a new technology.
1020
1021sk2
1022Between ancient Greece and today, skeuomorphism has popped up in many places. In the 1950s, wood-bodied station wagons became too expensive to produce, and Ford began exploring new materials and technologies. Because there was an attachment to wood, Ford installed fake wood paneling to ease buyers into the newer materials taking hold in vehicle manufacturing.
1023
1024
1025
1026With electric tea kettles, a form similar to the original stovetop counterpart is used—like a wide base, stove-like docking station, and gooseneck spout. This all helps ease consumers into a new technology by way of nostalgia! The tofu dog is made in the shape of the classic hot dog to appeal to those who are comfortable with hot dogs. (Imagine if this vegetarian product was housed in a spherical shape or otherwise. No thanks!)
1027
1028Through these examples, we can arrive at a basic definition: Skeuomorphism is design that emulates familiar materials to invoke a sense of familiarity or comfort in consumers.
1029
1030Controversy and authenticity
1031Skeuomorphism is highly controversial. Detractors say that it can often feel fake or inauthentic. Why replace a reliable stovetop kettle for one with a cheap plastic disc? It’s also often used to make cheaply made products look more expensive. That Ford Caprice might have been difficult for some folks to enjoy without feeling like they were faking it! In the case of the tofu dog, some vegetarians would argue they shouldn’t be made to fit in with carnivores (whose values they question).
1032
1033While skeuomorphism has certainly aided many technological transitions, there are always two sides to the story.
1034
1035Skeuomorphism in UI design
1036The shift from analog to digital is one of the biggest technological transitions our culture has ever encountered. Compared to previous technologies, computers, phones and tablets are incredibly complex machines. We’ve condensed countless machines and their functions to small, backlit screens filled with pixels. 
1037
1038Designing intuitive interfaces for such an expansive and abstract technology is a tall order. How would you make this realm of complex and powerful tech inviting to the average consumer? As you may have guessed, many UI designers have relied on familiarity, or skeuomorphs.
1039
1040
1041
1042In Apple’s iOS, the phone icon is shaped like a classic telephone receiver (despite cell phones looking nothing like that), and the email icon looks like a paper envelope (an object email doesn’t use). Similar to tofu dogs, we know that objects we are engaging with are not of the form which is displayed. But those familiar shapes help iOS users find a function that is similar to that of the analog counterparts. Additionally, the icons in iOS are slightly shiny and beveled to look like real buttons, which helps users know they can press those shapes on a flat screen the same way they might press an actual button.
1043
1044Creative Dash takes the button skeuomorph to the extreme in their hyper-realistic cinnamon bun. This example is so over the top that it is almost sarcastic, perhaps poking fun at how many UI designers try to make icons look like high-quality leather or expensive clocks.
1045
1046
1047
1048The Top Secret Case logo displays skeuomorphic metal textures and drop shadows. This designer has taken a simple vector design and given it an attitude which might feel familiar or appealing to people who want to feel tough or strong.
1049
1050Lastly, the D. Jiang app design creates the textural appearance of a wooden game board. All of the buttons have fake wood grain texture and visual depth to evoke a classic or vintage feeling.
1051
1052sk9
1053Flat design
1054—
1055Flat design takes influence from Swiss style design, which began in Russia, the Netherlands and Germany in the 1920s, then gained popularity through its development in Switzerland. Swiss style has an emphasis on readability, cleanliness, and minimalism. Designs from this movement are utilitarian, make efficient use of space, and are flat.
1056
1057Swiss style design resonated through many schools, most famously the Bauhaus school. One notable designer from this movement is Josef Muller-Brockman, who revolutionized grid systems. His work utilized space in the most efficient way possible—a highly relevant concept with regards to UI design.
1058
1059Flat in UI design
1060In both Windows 8 (2012) and iOS 7 (2013), we see a bold transition to flat design. In Windows 8, 3D buttons are replaced with simple rectangles and squares in a fluid layout, not unlike those of Josef Muller-Brockmann. Each 2D block has a single value, saturation and hue, without gradients. Similarly, iOS 7 also flattened out. The once shiny, beveled buttons lost their depth, icons no longer have drop shadows, and shapes use gradients very minimally. Both of these designs fit well within the definition of flat design.
1061
1062
1063
1064 
1065
1066
1067
1068Similar to Windows, Outside the Window also makes use of flat and colored rectangles. However, the app takes concepts from Swiss design and minimalism one step further by presenting rectangles without any separation. In fact, the only elements that take this design beyond strict geometry are the flat icons. This flat UI design embraces the digital interface and makes it look, well, digital!
1069
1070This simple Analytics app embodies the essence of flat design with no drop shadows, real-world materials or visual effects. The colors are all solid and flat, and the charts are nothing more than simple geometric shapes. This app is completely in touch with its digital medium. Let’s not forget that it feels intuitive too, which begs the question: is skeuomorphism necessary in our daily digital practices?
1071
1072Material
1073—
1074google_materialdesign14
1075In 2014, Google launched Material, a project that aims to “develop a single underlying system that allows for a unified experience across platforms and device sizes.” Inspired by paper and ink, Google invented an imaginary design “material” and created guidelines to use it. Because of its paper roots, you could call it skeuomorphic. However, it also fits firmly into the world of flat design due to intelligent layout, limited shadows and animation.
1076
1077material_design-svg
1078As a design language, Material Design has a set of strict visual guidelines. For example:
1079
1080No two pieces of Material can overlap.
1081All Material elements are opaque.
1082No Material elements can fold or bend.
1083The rules don’t end there. They also include guidelines for how a user can interact with an application. Google is trying to provide a toolkit for app developers to create the most utilitarian and intuitive apps possible. Sounds kind of like Swiss style thinking, no?
1084
1085Despite the paper influence and subtle shadows, Google Material is very much created in the spirit of flat design. Maybe it’s both skeuomorphic and flat? Perhaps. Regardless, it’ll certainly be interesting to see where app developers take this toolkit. If you have an Android phone, use Google’s apps, or are just a fan of UI design, we recommend keeping up-to-date on this design wave.
1086
1087Do you think Material Design is skeuomorphic or flat? Comment below!
1088
1089=====================
1090
1091Flat design rose in popularity pretty quickly back in 2013. But is its success thanks to its genuine usefulness and practicality, or is this just another web design trend that will fall to the wayside in a few years?
1092
1093
1094TEYE
1095Flat design certainly deserves merit for its return to a cleaner content-focused framework. But when taken to an extreme, it can just as easily leave sites feeling coldly architectured like a $20M hillside mansion with plenty of class but not enough coziness.
1096
1097In this piece, we’re going to take an in-depth look at the flat design style and discuss what works, and what simply falls flat.
1098
1099PROS AND CONS
1100Flat design started with the slate-like feel of early Windows Metro (as seen in their failed Zune player), but designers have realized that tasteful visual flourishes don’t necessarily distract from content. Today’s flat design–nicknamed Flat Design 2.0–is more advanced in the sense that common usage has reworked it to be more functional and applicable to a broader range of sites.
1101
1102But it’s still not perfect, and far from a cure-all solution to any design woes.
1103
1104Pros
1105
1106Responsive Frameworks – Flat design’s claim to fame is its simple visual layout, which is even more dramatic when you consider the skeuomorphic predecessors. Clean layouts are perfect for responsive frameworks, mobile or otherwise, offering faster load times and more natural breakpoints.
1107Easy browsing – Provided you create a clear visual hierarchy, another benefit of the simple layout is that it’s easier for the users to browse and find what they’re looking for.
1108Engaging colors – The vibrant color palettes provide more stimulating and exciting visuals than other styles. In modern flat design, however, you want to stick with a simple color palette (even monochromatic works well) or else your site will look like a tacky arrangement of tiles.
1109Clear graphics – The simplistic graphics and icons are quick and easy to understand, aiding in navigation and creating a more enjoyable experience. For a sophisticated look, try layering ghost buttons over large spreads of color or high-definition hero images.
1110Structured atmosphere – Bold lines and shapes express a logical, almost architectural feel. Instead of relying solely on a hamburger menu, however, we’d recommend a simple top navigation with clean typography.
1111Readable typography – The textual style, removed of unnecessary flourishes, ensures readability. As you remove the ornaments of design, you emphasize the content that remains.
1112Cons
1113
1114Design difficulty – A common misconception is that the minimalistic style makes a flat design easier to build, but the truth is closer to the opposite. Because the screen space is limited, each element must be chosen with care. In short, flat design is difficult to do well, but easy to do poorly.
1115Confusing clickability – The simplicity can sometimes work against the style, blurring the line between what’s clickable and what’s not.
1116Less signifiers – The restraints on the elements–for example, no textures–limit the amount of signifiers available.
1117“Boring” to Some – Certain users, like children, may find the minimalism boring.
1118Lack of identity – Due to the popularity, the more sites that use flat design, the more they all look the same.
1119The best approach to flat design, as with any design philosophy, is to focus less on the aesthetic and more on why you’re designing. Flat design is more about creating a design that provides only enough secondary elements to navigate the content. Don’t forget that the visual style is simply a byproduct of its content-first goals.
1120
1121FLAT CHARACTERISTICS THAT WILL SURVIVE
1122While there’s certainly an air of trendiness to the flat design craze, we do believe that some of its core elements are rooted in solid usability and visual design principles.
1123
1124The “sweet spot” in the evolution of flat design is somewhere between the original trend and the skeuomorphic ideals that were abandoned. The flat (or more appropriately almost flat) techniques that will endure are about two-thirds purely flat and one-third skeuomorphic.
1125
11261. Iconography
1127
1128Flat design helped icons get the respect they deserve. Since the page is more stripped down, designers must really focus on perfecting the details of these often-small elements.
1129
1130
1131HTTP://STASHFLATICONS.COM/
1132Now that users are becoming more accustomed to intricate icons, they won’t want to give them up. Icons are also being used in ways that give them more focus as an art element and not just something for users to click on. Avenues to express a site’s style and individuality will also be welcome by users and designers alike.
1133
11342. Typography
1135
1136As described in the free e-book Web Design Trends 2015 & 2016, the focus on beautiful typography, custom typefaces, and lettering with purpose continues to grow.
1137
1138
1139HTTP://WWW.SKEWEDICONS.COM/
1140With other trends such as hero headers, oversized typography or type-only websites, the influence of flat is easy to see in many of the type selections designers are making.
1141
11423. Minimalism
1143
1144That minimalism as an artistic style has existed for decades is a good sign it will continue to endure. Simple, easy-on-the-eyes designs are a top choice for landing pages especially because their style is captivating and usable.
1145
1146
1147HTTP://WWW.MICELISTUDIOS.COM/
1148From a practical standpoint, minimal designs also adapt well to responsive breakpoints thanks to the sparsity of on-screen elements.
1149
11504. Single Type Families
1151
1152The use of “one design, one font” emerges as another branch from the simple typography ideas of flat design.
1153
1154While type is simple and readable, this concept removes some of the focus from the design of lettering to the surrounding design and words themselves (which is the real purpose of good typography anyways). Logos, however, may still be presented in a separate font to reflect the brand identity.
1155
1156
1157HTTP://HUNCWOT.COM/ VIAAWWWARDS
11585. Color Usage
1159
1160The application of bright color may fluctuate according to trends, but it’s far more than just eye candy.
1161
1162
1163HTTP://WEAREC2.COM/#/
1164Rather than filling a flat-style website with color, the preferred option has shifted to using color as an accent tool. As explained in Interaction Design Best Practices, this also pairs well with minimal concepts that include a lot of white space or sites that use large images as a focal point.
1165
1166FLAT CHARACTERISTICS THAT MAY FADE AWAY
1167Other elements of flat design are starting to burn out almost as quickly as they came into the limelight.
1168
1169Most of these elements include “fun” design features that are difficult to employ in a user-friendly way. When done well, each of these techniques can result in a brilliantly designed and highly usable site, but more often than not these elements underwhelm.
1170
1171Huge color palettes – Flat design gave designers a new freedom in the allowance to use massive color palettes. Fun for a while, the end result was a little bit of color chaos, and most flat-style concepts are returning to traditional color palettes that contain only a handful of hues.
1172Long shadows – Long shadows are beginning to disappear almost as quickly as they became a trend. Designers are still using shadows, but are opting for a more subtler, softer aesthetic.
1173Ambiguous emphasis – One of the flaws of flat design is that it best worked on simple designs because of the lack of emphasis on any element over another. This problem has been realized and the “⅔ flat, ⅓ skeuomorphic” concepts are an effort at correcting this lack of visual hierarchy.
1174Fear of visual flourish – Flat purists have no room to talk about simple shadows or ornamentation of any kind. The majority of designers, however, are more flexible in using subtle design tricks–shadows, simple gradients and other hints of realism (color=#545454)–to create visually distinct experiences.
1175Super-thin typefaces – Some of the early type in flat design outlines was actually difficult to read; in fact, there was an entire argument surrounding the choice of Helvetica Neue when Apple went flat. Super-thin or ultra-light typefaces are less popular, while medium-width strokes are more popular thanks to improved legibility and readability.
1176Luckily, flat design is not an “all-or-nothing” style. Traits can be taken or left at will, according to the project. In general though, you’re much better off focusing on the fundamentals behind flat design rather than simply copying its aesthetic.
1177
1178CONCLUSION
1179While these days flat design seems trendy, there are reasons why flat design has risen in popularity. Even if the flat aesthetic gets replaced in the near future, we still think that whatever takes the throne will be flat-inspired.
1180
1181The visual style does, after all, represent a huge leap forward in terms of visual maturity. And when you take a look at Material Design’s manifesto, you get a glimpse into evolved design philosophies that aren’t afraid to introduce a dimension of real-world physics to make the canvassed layout feel more relatable.
1182
1183Flat design is like the rebellious teenager who started realizing not everything was worth fighting against. In 2013, it raged against anything skeuomorphic, but as it mellows out, we see the return of texture and gradient for creating familiarity with users.
1184
1185When you consider the spirit behind flat design (visual simplicity) and skeuomorphism (visual familiarity), you find that both concepts can certainly co-exist. The tricky part, as current years and the future will certainly prove, is finding the perfect balance between the two.
1186========================
1187
1188As seen in our previous article on the subject and examples around the web, minimalism is quite the trend.
1189
1190When the theory behind it is well implemented, it makes for some beautiful, simple and yet modern designs.
1191
1192Because it is a trend, everyone wants to follow it. But can it be taken too far? And is it right for all types of websites?
1193
1194This article explores some of the potentially negative side-effects of minimalist designs and the consequences of implementing one incorrectly.
1195
1196Unlike our previous post, we’ll look at when minimalism is a bad idea, however inspiring it is supposed to be.
1197
1198 
1199
1200It’s Just a Style
1201Simplifying a website is one thing, but minimalism on its own is just a style. It is a style just as grunge, illustrated and sleek Web 2.0 are styles.
1202
1203Sometimes we forget that and assume that every design needs it.
1204
1205Styles
1206Minimalist design is the inclusion of only the bare essentials in an attractive and usable layout.
1207
1208There are no gradients or strokes and no superfluous imagery, colors, textures or the like. Often you’ll find one main visual element and a few pieces of content.
1209
1210Many websites could benefit from more content, though, as well as more visual stimulation. We’ll look at a few examples and see why minimalism is trendy but not imperative.
1211
1212 
1213
1214Minimalism Is for “Artsy” Websites
1215Extreme minimalism is inspiring and has made recent appearances in portfolios and other creative-type websites.
1216
1217As creative people, we see the beauty and understand the logic in it and long to create our clients’ websites in the same image, all the while not realizing that it may simply not be practical.
1218
1219Minimalist design, to put it simply, best suits modern websites in creative industries.
1220
1221It has an outside-the-box attitude and allows designers to be original with components such as the wireframe and navigation.
1222
1223 
1224
1225The Ordinary Web User
1226We know why we love minimalist design. Now it’s time to consider the average user’s perspective.
1227
1228Many people in non-design-related fields don’t fully appreciate minimalist design or even find it visually appealing. And because the vast majority of Internet users are not creative types, we have to respect this view and address it accordingly.
1229
1230Take the design below as an example. This popular minimalist design has been featured in many showcases. It’s a beautiful design and highly effective. It also happens to be the portfolio of a designer, so it fits our model.
1231
1232Imagine if it were a musician’s website. Obviously, this wouldn’t be the right look. Even with the right visual elements substituted, it still wouldn’t have the right look.
1233
1234What if the website belonged to a business consulting company? A bit too bare still.
1235
1236Some websites just look and work better with more content and a fuller design.
1237
1238Rikcat
1239
1240
1241Supplementary features are also what makes certain types of websites so successful. Take the magazine website below:
1242
1243Self
1244A website like this thrives on rich content, enticing the viewer with fun and entertaining articles, videos, blogs, programs, etc.
1245
1246A minimalist look would not engage the reader much at all. This website is successful because of the sheer amount of visual interactivity right on the home page.
1247
1248 
1249
1250Content-Rich vs. Cluttered
1251We often mistake non-minimalist websites as being cluttered, and therefore ugly. No doubt, cluttered websites are confusing and unattractive.
1252
1253New designers often make the mistake of adding and adding and adding, and then their clients are forced to tell them to remove most of the clutter.
1254
1255Even experienced designers think first to remove elements when something is “missing.”
1256
1257“Cluttered” has almost become a four-letter word—and rightly so. But content-rich websites have also dropped in esteem because of their association with clutter. Are content-rich websites really cluttered?
1258
1259Cluttered vs. Content-Heavy
1260Usually, no. A genuinely cluttered design has little white space; its typographic styles, colors and other elements clash; it is a disorganized mess; the wireframe is ineffective or absent; and content is excessive, not rich.
1261
1262We have to understand what excessive really meanss. What happened to being happy with a reasonable amount of content and layout elements?
1263
1264 
1265
1266Are We Just Lazy?
1267For those of us who follow a minimalist style, why do we do it?
1268
1269Is it because we genuinely love the style, despite the complexity of mastering it? Are we committed to using only the minimum requirements in the most effective way, based on our learning and analytics? Or do we do it because we’re lazy?
1270
1271Minimalism is undoubtedly effective. But it’s not for everyone, and some people prefer other styles.
1272
1273In spite of what’s best for a particular project, we may opt for a minimalist style to avoid having to work on difficult code, slicing or features. Looking at the best minimalist designs, it’s easy to see why imitations abound.
1274
1275If you’re guilty of this, don’t worry: it happens to most of us at some point. Just bear in mind that a truly minimalist style takes time to develop, like any complex style.
1276
1277If you’re simply opposed to working out challenging graphical elements, though, you’re doing a disservice to the project.
1278
1279 
1280
1281Minimalism Misused
1282When venturing into minimalist territory, be sure it is right for the website you’re working on.
1283
1284Also, try to understand minimalism’s true value, to avoid resorting to it as a quick fix. Below are a few common mistakes made with minimalist design and reasons why it gets a bad rap.
1285
1286Self-Defeating Usability
1287Minimalist websites should be the most usable websites, because nothing is there to confuse or get in the way; and the text is thought out extra carefully. Often though, with little on the page, visitors have difficulty figuring out where to go. So, attention to visual hierarchy is a must. Also, getting creative with the navigation is great, but don’t get too creative.
1288Minimal Design or Minimal Interest?
1289Beautifully minimal or just plain boring? You can make a minimalist design interesting in a number of ways, while preserving its calm and simple appeal.
1290Is the Message Strong Enough?
1291Minimalist designs are best for adorning messages that are compelling on their own. The idea is to strip the website of any excess content or elements that would detract from the message. If the message is weak, ill-conceived or absent, then a minimalist design may not be the right choice. Brochure websites are an example of this: basic information with no distinct message.
1292 
1293
1294Wrapping Up
1295Born in the late 1950s, minimalism has become a design ideal. Most of the time, we improve a design by simplifying it: that’s a basic design rule.
1296
1297Many people assume, though, that simplifying a design means stripping it to the bare bone. This isn’t—and shouldn’t be—the case.
1298
1299We have to learn to recognize what types of websites would and would not benefit from a minimalist style.
1300
1301The deciding factor may be the target audience’s sensibility, the client’s goals or the way visitors will use the website. But there is an appropriate style for each website, and the decision should not be taken lightly.
1302
1303Look at your content, and figure out the design that would best carry it, whether minimalist or not.
1304
1305===================
1306
1307Brian Eno – artist, composer, inventor, thinker – spoke to Kevin Kelly about the meaning of Africa for music and technology.
1308
1309“Africa is everything that something like classical music isn’t. Classical—perhaps I should say “orchestral”—music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It’s all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities. And the fact that orchestras play the same thing over and over bothers me. Classical music is music without Africa. It represents old-fashioned hierarchical structures, ranking, all the levels of control. Orchestral music represents everything I don’t want from the Renaissance: extremely slow feedback loops.
1310
1311If you’re a composer writing that kind of music, you don’t get to hear what your work sounds like for several years. Thus, the orchestral composer is open to all the problems and conceits of the architect, liable to be trapped in a form that is inherently nonimprovisational, nonempirical. I shouldn’t be so absurdly doctrinaire, but I have to say that I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass if I never heard another piece of such music. It provides almost nothing useful for me.
1312
1313But what is tremendously exciting to me is the collision of vernacular Western music with African music. So much that I love about music comes from that collision. African music underlies practically everything I do—even ambient, since it arose directly out of wanting to see what happened if you “unlocked” the sounds in a piece of music, gave them their freedom, and didn’t tie them all to the same clock. That kind of free float—these peculiar mixtures of independence and interdependence, and the oscillation between them – is a characteristic of West African drumming patterns. I want to go into the future to see this sensibility I find in African culture, to see it freed from the catastrophic situation that Africa’s in at the moment. I don’t know how they’re going to get freed from that, but I desperately want to see this next stage when African culture begins once again to strongly impact ours.
1314
1315Do you know what I hate about computers? The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them. This is why I can’t use them for very long. Do you know what a nerd is? A nerd is a human being without enough Africa in him or her. I know this sounds sort of inversely racist to say, but I think the African connection is so important. You know why music was the center of our lives for such a long time? Because it was a way of allowing Africa in. In 50 years, it might not be Africa; it might be Brazil. But I want so desperately for that sensibility to flood into these other areas, like computers.
1316
1317What’s pissing me off is that it uses so little of my body. You’re just sitting there, and it’s quite boring. You’ve got this stupid little mouse that requires one hand, and your eyes. That’s it. What about the rest of you? No African would stand for a computer like that. It’s imprisoning.”
1318
1319==========================
1320
1321Gossip is Philosophy
1322
1323
1324
1325Wired: Somewhere along the line, art seemed to lose its significance. No offense to you, but who cares about painting?
1326
1327Eno: I'm acutely aware of being involved in something that ought to be making more of a difference than it is. But art has not ceased to affect us; it's just that the process we call art is happening elsewhere, in areas that might be called by other names. I always think of medieval heraldry: so intensely relevant for hundreds of years, and now a total mystery to nearly all of us. The traditional sites for art activity seem to be losing their power, while new sites for art are becoming powerful. We have been looking for art in the wrong places.
1328
1329Let's say I was to give you a round-trip ticket to the past, when art really made a difference. Where would you go?
1330
1331The intellectual Arab world at its height – somewhere between, say, the beginning of the 11th century and the middle of the 13th – would have been absolutely amazing to experience.
1332
1333Why there and then? Why not the Renaissance a little later?
1334
1335I've never been that thrilled by the Renaissance, to tell you the truth. I can imagine the excitement of having been there, but it seems to me that the Renaissance had a great deal to do with leaving things out of the picture. It was about ignoring part of our psyche – the part that's a bit messy and barbarian. There was also a sense of perfectibility, of the possibility of certainty – a sense that has become a real albatross to us.
1336
1337But there are analogies between the height of the Arab world and today. At that time, there was a big shift from one type of consciousness to another. Old systems decayed and broke up, and, painfully, new ones were born. The equilibration between science and alchemy, and philosophy and religion, would have been thrilling to behold.
1338
1339Now, am I allowed to move forward as well, into the future?
1340
1341It's a different ticket, but I can grant that as well. How far in the future do you want to go?
1342
1343Oh, only about 50 years.
1344
1345Doesn't that seem like a waste of magic? Fifty years – you might get there yourself. You just can't wait, is that the problem?
1346
1347Yeah, I can't wait. I want to know what happens to Africa.
1348
1349Africa?
1350
1351Africa is everything that something like classical music isn't. Classical – perhaps I should say "orchestral" – music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities. And the fact that orchestras play the same thing over and over bothers me. Classical music is music without Africa. It represents old-fashioned hierarchical structures, ranking, all the levels of control. Orchestral music represents everything I don't want from the Renaissance: extremely slow feedback loops.
1352
1353If you're a composer writing that kind of music, you don't get to hear what your work sounds like for several years. Thus, the orchestral composer is open to all the problems and conceits of the architect, liable to be trapped in a form that is inherently nonimprovisational, nonempirical. I shouldn't be so absurdly doctrinaire, but I have to say that I wouldn't give a rat's ass if I never heard another piece of such music. It provides almost nothing useful for me.
1354
1355But what is tremendously exciting to me is the collision of vernacular Western music with African music. So much that I love about music comes from that collision. African music underlies practically everything I do – even ambient, since it arose directly out of wanting to see what happened if you "unlocked" the sounds in a piece of music, gave them their freedom, and didn't tie them all to the same clock. That kind of free float – these peculiar mixtures of independence and interdependence, and the oscillation between them – is a characteristic of West African drumming patterns. I want to go into the future to see this sensibility I find in African culture, to see it freed from the catastrophic situation that Africa's in at the moment. I don't know how they're going to get freed from that, but I desperately want to see this next stage when African culture begins once again to strongly impact ours.
1356
1357Do you have any guesses about what that reunited culture would look like?
1358
1359Yes. Do you know what I hate about computers? The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them. This is why I can't use them for very long. Do you know what a nerd is? A nerd is a human being without enough Africa in him or her. I know this sounds sort of inversely racist to say, but I think the African connection is so important. You know why music was the center of our lives for such a long time? Because it was a way of allowing Africa in. In 50 years, it might not be Africa; it might be Brazil. But I want so desperately for that sensibility to flood into these other areas, like computers.
1360
1361Whenever I hear a neat dichotomy between the fuzzy logic of Africa versus the digital logic of a white tribe, I always find it interesting to triangulate and introduce the Asians. Where do the Asians fit into this?
1362
1363It could be that any strong infusion from another place would help greatly. The African one is just the one I understand well. But the Near East can show what happens. For instance, harmony is primarily a Western invention. There is no equivalent to harmonic interest in Arabic music. In the West, the orchestra was invented to play harmonies. But in the Near East, the whole orchestra plays the same thing. So Arabs take the orchestra, which was basically a machine for making harmony, and make it a machine for making texture, which is an Asian preoccupation. It plays one voice, always. But it's a voice that can have different and changing textures. So this is a perfect example of using a Western tool and linking it with what I think is an Asian sensibility, the interest in texture. And, bingo! There you have it, this huge texture-making machine, the orchestra.
1364
1365So, how does one Africanize, or Brazilianize, or otherwise liberate a computer? Get mad with it. I ask myself, What is pissing me off about this thing? What's pissing me off is that it uses so little of my body. You're just sitting there, and it's quite boring. You've got this stupid little mouse that requires one hand, and your eyes. That's it. What about the rest of you? No African would stand for a computer like that. It's imprisoning.
1366
1367So, we need to make whole-body computers that get the heart pumping, through which we can dance out text and pictures and messages? Why haven't we done that yet?
1368
1369History is changed by people who get pissed off. Only neo-vegetables enjoy using computers the way they are at the moment. If you want to make computers that really work, create a design team composed only of healthy, active women with lots else to do in their lives and give them carte blanche. Do not under any circumstances consult anyone who (a) is fascinated by computer games (b) tends to describe silly things as "totally cool" (c) has nothing better to do except fiddle with these damn things night after night.
1370
1371What? And give up all those totally cool buttons?!
1372
1373I've been telling synthesizer manufacturers for years that the issue is not increasing the number of internal options. The issue is increasing rapport, making a thing that relates to you physically in a better way. Of course the easy course is to add options, since absolutely no conceptual rethink is required. But the relationship between user and machine might be better achieved by reducing options.
1374
1375If I could give you a black box that could do anything, what would you have it do?
1376
1377I would love to have a box onto which I could offload choice making. A thing that makes choices about its outputs, and says to itself, This is a good output, reinforce that, or replay it, or feed it back in. I would love to have this machine stand for me. I could program this box to be my particular taste and interest in things.
1378
1379Why do you want to do that? You have you.
1380
1381Yes, I have me. But I want to be able to sell systems for making my music as well as selling pieces of music. In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of "their" works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box. Or you could buy a Brian Eno box. So then I would need to put in this box a device that represents my taste for choosing pieces.
1382
1383I guess the only thing weirder than hearing your own music being broadcast on the radios of strangers is hearing music that you might have written being broadcast!
1384
1385Yes, music that I might have written but didn't!
1386
1387Will you still like the idea of these surrogate Brian Enos when they start generating your best work?
1388
1389Sure! Naturally, it's a modifiable box, you know. Say you like Brahms and Brian Eno. You could get the two of them to collaborate on something, see what happens if you allow them to hybridize. The possibilities for this are fabulous.
1390
1391What's left for us to do then?
1392
1393Cheat. And lie.
1394
1395Some people listening to your music might think that it is already being written by one of your black boxes.
1396
1397For years, I have been using rules to write music, but without computers. For instance, I've used systems of multiple tape loops that are allowed to reconfigure in various ways, while all I do is supply the original musical sounds or elements and then the system keeps throwing out new patterns of them. It is a kaleidoscopic music machine that keeps making new variations and new clumps.
1398
1399My rules were designed to try to make a kind of music I couldn't predict. That's to say, I wanted to construct "machines" (in a purely conceptual sense – not physical things) that would make music for me. The whole idea was summarized in the famous saying (which I must have shouted from the ramparts a thousand times): "Process not product!" The task of artists was to "imitate nature in its manner of operation" as John Cage put it – to think of ways of dealing with sound that were guided by an instinct for beautiful "processes" rather than by a taste for nice music.
1400
1401By the early '70s, I had made and experienced a great deal of systems music, as all this had come to be known. I wanted to make music that was not only systemically interesting, but also that I felt like hearing again. So, increasingly, my attention went into the sonic material that I was feeding into my "repatterning machines." This became my area: I extended the composing act into the act of constructing sound itself.
1402
1403This wasn't an idea by any means original to me – I picked it up from people like Phil Spector and Shadow Morton and Jimi Hendrix. They were all people from the world of pop, a world that had hardly penetrated the relatively insular landscape of "systems music," which still regarded the palette available to a composer as a series of little disconnected islands of discrete and describable sounds – "viola," "clarinet," "tam-tam" – rather than as a place where you faced the compositional problem that every rock musician was used to dealing with: what sound should I invent?
1404
1405Can you imagine what music will be like 20 years from now?
1406
1407What people are going to be selling more of in the future is not pieces of music, but systems by which people can customize listening experiences for themselves. Change some of the parameters and see what you get. So, in that sense, musicians would be offering unfinished pieces of music – pieces of raw material, but highly evolved raw material, that has a strong flavor to it already. I can also feel something evolving on the cusp between "music," "game," and "demonstration" – I imagine a musical experience equivalent to watching John Conway's computer game of Life or playing SimEarth, for example, in which you are at once thrilled by the patterns and the knowledge of how they are made and the metaphorical resonances of such a system. Such an experience falls in a nice new place – between art and science and playing. This is where I expect artists to be working more and more in the future.
1408
1409Could we call this new style "interactive music?"
1410
1411In a blinding flash of inspiration, the other day I realized that "interactive" anything is the wrong word. Interactive makes you imagine people sitting with their hands on controls, some kind of gamelike thing. The right word is "unfinished." Think of cultural products, or art works, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished. We come from a cultural heritage that says things have a "nature," and that this nature is fixed and describable. We find more and more that this idea is insupportable – the "nature" of something is not by any means singular, and depends on where and when you find it, and what you want it for. The functional identity of things is a product of our interaction with them. And our own identities are products of our interaction with everything else. Now a lot of cultures far more "primitive" than ours take this entirely for granted – surely it is the whole basis of animism that the universe is a living, changing, changeable place. Does this make clearer why I welcome that African thing? It's not nostalgia or admiration of the exotic – it's saying, Here is a bundle of ideas that we would do well to learn from.
1412
1413Finishing implies interactive: your job is to complete something for that moment in time. A very clear example of this is hypertext. It's not pleasant to use – because it happens on computer screens – but it is a far-reaching revolution in thinking. The transition from the idea of text as a line to the idea of text as a web is just about as big a change of consciousness as we are capable of. I can imagine the hypertext consciousness spreading to things we take in, not only things we read. I am very keen on this unfinished idea because it co-opts things like screen savers and games and models and even archives, which are basically unfinished pieces of work.
1414
1415So a screen saver would be the visual equivalent of an Eno music machine?
1416
1417I've been working on my own mutations of an After Dark screen saver called Stained Glass. If you set up the initial conditions slightly differently, you see a completely different sequence of events. All your interaction with the program is right at the beginning, when you set it up. But I think this should certainly be called interactive, as the whole process of what then happens depends on what you've set up at the beginning.
1418
1419Besides being in an unfinished state, do you have any other notions of what music will be like in 20 years?
1420
1421In the last 15 years, music has ceased to be the center of people's cultural life. We both come from a generation in which music was where it all got acted out. The other arts were somewhat in the rear. Music has had its day. A lot of music now doesn't really have an independent existence separate from the places it's played in. For instance, a lot of rave music and ambient and trance and so on has very much to do with clubs and lots of people being together and so on. It's very context-linked. And quite often on records it sounds rather dull. I read recently that a survey revealed that the average CD was listened to two and a quarter times.
1422
1423So, where has the culture recentered itself? Where is it getting acted out?
1424
1425Not in any one place in particular; it's going to be in a variety of places. Theme parks are a relatively new cultural form that is going to become more and more a place for artists to look. A theme park, of course, is a multimedia experience wherein you can use any sense you like.
1426
1427My guess is that the cultural center might settle onto MUDs. They are online theme parks. Not-quite-virtual realities that can be done on a screen, without goggles and gloves. They will have all the richness and emotional power and generational identity that music gave us. A vast visual MUD – where you can explore a world that you can also partly make, if you care to – will become the center for a new youth culture.
1428
1429I absolutely agree. I think that prediction's right on. And I'll make another one as well: More Court TV! Court TV gets dismissed as mere voyeurism, but voyeurism is never mere: you're only voyeuristic about things that you are very interested in. You're not voyeuristic about things that bore you. I think what Court TV indicates is that people are fascinated by these new moral problems that are coming up.
1430
1431Each one of those big trials – William Kennedy Smith, the Menendez brothers, Lorena Bobbitt, and now O.J. Simpson – represents critical moral issues. What are the relationships between people at the moment? Are moral relationships the same as legal ones? Or do they overlap? Or are they different? I think people are fascinated by these problems, and I'm glad they are. That's another big future as well. Today, gossip is philosophy.
1432
1433
1434Breeding art
1435
1436What kind of advice would you give to a musician now starting off, figuring that she or he may come to a peak in 10 years?
1437
1438Oddly enough, I rarely talk to young musicians, but I talk to many young painters, because I teach in art schools. I ask them: Why do you think that what you do ends at the edges of this canvas? Think of the frame. What frame are you working in? Not just that bit of wood round the edge, but the room you're in, the light you're in, the time and place you're in. How can you redesign it? I would say that to musicians, too. I see them spending a lot of time working on the internal details of what they're doing and far less time working on the ways of positioning it in the world. By "positioning it" I don't only mean thinking of ways of getting it to a record company, but thinking of where it could go, and where it fits in the cultural picture – what else does it relate to?
1439
1440One of the ways of rethinking the frame is to evolve art. I have in mind an exhibit I saw of Karl Sims's genetically evolved computer graphic images. They were stunning! One after another, they would come up, grown by his machine. And you would see pictures that neither you nor nature could have imagined. A really good music machine could do the same thing.
1441
1442That's exactly what I hope for. Interestingly, systems and rules in music allow you to come up with things that your sense of taste would never have allowed you to do. But then your sense of taste expands to accommodate them! For instance, I'm sitting here now looking at something that my Stained Glass machine just made on my monitor. It has color combinations in it that are so weird. I would never dream of putting these things together. But, soon they start to look pretty good, and then they start to look really good.
1443
1444My theory is that almost anything that can be evolved will seem beautiful.
1445
1446Absolutely right. This is the reason that that damn Stained Glass screen saver thing works so beautifully. Because it's the only one that has any evolutionary qualities to it. Most attempts to mechanically manufacture music are apt to fail because they are modeled to create sameness, whereas what interests us is difference. Having said that, I'm quite keen on the idea of evolutionary music because it doesn't attempt to base itself on some sort of absolute theory about what makes good music. We can still say we don't really know what makes music nice, but we know when we like it. So we'll feed some into a processor and see if it can sort of breed some new versions of it that we haven't heard before.
1447
1448I have discovered three uses for artificial evolution as a tool. One is to bring you to somewhere you would not have thought of – to evolve a pattern, or an organism you couldn't dream of. The second use is to generate the details that you would not ordinarily have time to even conceive doing – to mutate out a pattern in ways that you just do not have time to do alone. And the third, and most powerful, is to create new spaces to explore.
1449
1450If I could suggest a reason for wanting to make music machines, the reason would be to do these things. Not to replicate music, but to invent new experiences completely.
1451
1452You've seen the software Photoshop, right? It not only gives you tools that bridge painting and photography, it also contains a program that lets you mutate and evolve textures. It's like the invention of oil paint and horticulture combined! But so far there is no one, not even bad artists, attempting to create major art with it.
1453
1454I've become rather engrossed with Photoshop in my own work. My first reaction is the same as yours: "My god – with these tools, the whole look of design should have changed. Why hasn't it?" The answer is generally that, as with all computer-based things, the technology filters out most of the interesting people, and forces them to wait. It takes immense amounts of time to trawl through the dreadful manuals and engage in conversations with the addled numbskulls who get enthusiastic about this crap. Only nitwits make it through (with enormous exceptions, of course), since only they have that kind of time to spare.
1455
1456
1457Surfing on entropy
1458
1459You seem to have a fondness for engineering. Why aren't you afraid of machines?
1460
1461I'm lazy; that's why I like machines. They do things I would not have thought of. I can put things into them, and then I can see something happen there beyond what I would have had the time, the taste, or the endurance to have produced myself. I usually don't want to slavishly make something in detail. I want to produce the conditions from which it and many its could come into existence. I think of myself as a machine builder in a way. Making a record for me is inventing a way of making music. And once I've tried it a few times, I want to invent another way. The thrill for me is to think of new ways of doing it, and new places to do it, and new sites in which music might happen, and new ingredients that might be used in it, and so on. So, machines are very much part of what I do.
1462
1463Do you think of yourself as a machine?
1464
1465I try to, but I'm not very successful at it!
1466
1467In a lot of the art community, "mechanical" is a dirty word. You seem to have sort of flipped it around, using "mechanical" as a good, useful, and positive word.
1468
1469"Machine" has come to have a dirty connotation because it's come to mean systems that do predictable, boring, and repetitive things. But the machines that I'm talking about do things we didn't expect. The lesson of complexity theory: allow some simple systems to interact – watch the variety evolve.
1470
1471Has computer science influenced you any?
1472
1473Cybernetician stafford Beer had a great phrase that I lived by for years: Instead of trying to specify the system in full detail, specify it only somewhat. You then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go. He was talking about heuristics, as opposed to algorithms. Algorithms are a precise set of instructions, such as take the first on the left, walk 121 yards, take the second on the right, da da da da. A heuristic, on the other hand, is a general and vague set of instructions. What I'm looking for is to make heuristic machines that you can ride on.
1474
1475Doesn't that make things out of control?
1476
1477People tend to think that it's total control or no control. But the interesting place is in the middle of that.
1478
1479Right. We have no word for that state of in-between control. We have some words like "management," or "herding," or "husbandry." All these are words for co-control.
1480
1481I call it "surfing." When you surf, there is a powerful complicated system, but you're riding on it, you're going somewhere on it, and you can make some choices about it.
1482
1483I think I know what you mean. Artificial life researchers talk about surfing the wave of increasing complexity. A very complex system gets close to a certain edge between rigid control and utter chaos – that's when the whole thing can surf to the next level of complexity. They see this in evolutionary systems. Some go as far as to say that's what life does: surf on entropy.
1484
1485I like that. Metaphors involving the sea are very powerful to me. You have this interesting conflict – a sense of direction, a need to get somewhere, but in a medium that has its own, probably different, sense of direction. You can use the piggyback power of that medium, but you have to keep paying attention, making your own adjustments. Unless you really do want to go with the flow.
1486
1487
1488Leaving things alone
1489
1490You once went around asking various bands to pretend they were an African robot factory and you had them make the sounds they imagined hearing in such a place. Did anything ever come of that?
1491
1492Yes. Some of the tracks on my album Nerve Net. That's a technique I now use when I'm producing. I try to imagine us in a playing situation of some kind. The most important thing you can say to people when they're working is to forget about music. Really. I can't stand people thinking about music in the studio. People with musical instruments should be banned from recording studios because they so often center the process around history. They know all the tricks to make things that sound like music. But what I want to do is to make an experience of some kind. And we happen to have these tools to do it with, which happen to be called musical instruments, or recording studios, or whatever. If you can really get this message across, of making an experience instead of music, it's extremely liberating to people.
1493
1494There are different ways of doing this. On the new work I've been doing with David Bowie, I wrote some "roles" and "scenarios" for the musicians – there were six of us – and we each played out our individual roles. The interesting catch was that no one knew what role anyone else was playing. One scenario, for example, suggested: You are a player in a Neo-M-Base improvising collective. It is 1999, the eve of the millennium. The world is holding its breath, and things are tense internationally. You are playing atonal, ice-like sheets of sound that hang limpid in the air, making a shifting background tint behind the music. You think of yourself as the tonal geology of the music – the harmonic underpinning from which everything else grows. When you are featured, you cascade through glacial arpeggios – incredibly slow and grand, or tumbling with intricate internal confusion. Between these cascades, you fire out short staccato bursts of knotty tonality. You love the old albums of The Mahavishnu Orchestra.
1495
1496I can hear the music now!
1497
1498The other thing I say is, Think about landscapes. Forget that we're making a song. Think we're making the sound of a landscape. So I paint a scene. I say we're on the outskirts of a big industrial city, an old city with lots of smokestack industries. We're just in the country. It's dark, but we can still see the flames and steam coming out of those things to our left, and to the right there's just darkness. Then when I say, OK, let's make the soundtrack for that movie. People start playing in a completely different way and find resources of playing they didn't know about at all. For instance, in Laurie Anderson's studio, we would spend a lot of our listening time staring out of the window over the water, watching huge boats drift noiselessly into the harbor. For a few days, we followed a rule that everything we made had to make sense with that view. It was liberating in that it allowed us to accept some quite "unmusical" things – because they worked with the view.
1499
1500Since you're asking musicians to forget about the history of music, why don't you just cut to the chase and work with nonmusicians?
1501
1502Nonmusicians often respond to it much better. Because a nonmusician is thrilled to be doing music and is quite happy to sit there and plunk one note all day. And is very alert to the effect of that. Nonmusicians really listen sometimes, because that's the only thing they have available to them. Musicians very often don't listen; they work from the program, and the program says move your fingers fast or whatever. Of course, as a now-experienced maker of records, I'm as susceptible to this inattention and working-to-formula as anyone else.
1503
1504It seems as if a tone-deaf hacker might do just as well as a concert violinist in the setting that you're proposing.
1505
1506There's an axis between musicians and non-musicians, and I tend to pick people right across the axis. Nonmusicians have a certain freshness. On the other hand, of course, a really good musician will not only listen but will be able to isolate and develop whatever is peculiar and interesting about what he or she is doing. A really good musician is not embarrassed to play something simple, and will play it well. Ideally, what you want to have are systems for switching you between the very different roles of creative-person-who-wants-to-try-lots-of-clever-new-tricks and listener-who-wants-a-moving-experience. In fact, pop music is extremely spongelike in terms of the talents it uses. Pop music can absorb so many peculiar talents, ranging from the completely nonmusical poseur who just uses music as a kind of springboard for a sense of style, to people who just love putting all that complicated stuff together, brick by brick, on their computers, to people like me who like playing conceptual games and being surprised. I mean, calling it "music" is really sort of a mistake. It's drama with noise.
1507
1508What is your role when you are in a studio?
1509
1510Funnily enough, a lot of what I find myself – surreptitiously – doing as a producer is thinking of elaborate diversionary tactics designed to make us leave things alone – at least long enough to listen to them as "audience." I find that when you're listening with a view to doing further work, you don't generally hear the totality of something but just the little gaps where you could squeeze in something else. Audiences, I find, nearly always appreciate more space and emptiness in a work than the creators of those works would like to tolerate. I noticed this first when working with tape recorders in the early days – that, having made something, I preferred hearing it at half its original speed: twice as empty.
1511
1512Is that what you call yourself these days, a producer? What is your job?
1513
1514[Laughs.] I have often wondered! As a producer, I'm not just saying, Oh, let's get a good bass drum sound. I'm saying, OK, look, this thing you're doing now is hinting at a certain universe of things that I believe are connected. A frame maker is another way of describing my role: "OK, let's put a descriptive frame around this, look at everything that we've included inside our frame, and see how those things relate to one another. And what if we extend the frame to include all these other possibilities?" Of course, at the time you do it, it looks like you're including more marginal things in it. For example, when I first started making records, it was unusual for someone to come into the studio without a prewritten piece of music, to sit there, as I did, and make it up with whatever was there. Now it's how nearly everybody works. People hardly ever go into a studio with completely prewritten material now. Those kinds of innovations always look marginal at the time, but in fact often become central later on.
1515
1516Would the frame-identifying role be relevant to all types of artists?
1517
1518Yes. An artist is now a curator. An artist is now much more seen as a connector of things, a person who scans the enormous field of possible places for artistic attention, and says, What I am going to do is draw your attention to this sequence of things. If you read art history up until 25 or 30 years ago, you'd find there was this supposition of succession: from Verrocchio, through Giotto, Primaticcio, Titian, and so on, as if a crown passes down through the generations. But in the 20th century, instead of that straight kingly line, there's suddenly a broad field of things that get called art, including vernacular things, things from other cultures, things using new technologies like photo and film. It's difficult to make any simple linear connection through them.
1519
1520Now, the response of early modern art history was to say, Oh, OK. All we do is broaden the line to include more of the things we now find ourselves regarding as art. So there's still a line, but it's much broader. But what postmodernist thinking is suggesting is that there isn't one line, there's just a field, a field through which different people negotiate differently. Thus there is no longer such a thing as "art history" but there are multiple "art stories." Your story might involve foot-binding, Indonesian medicine rituals, and late Haydn string quartets, something like that. You have made what seems to you a meaningful pattern in this field of possibilities. You've drawn your own line. This is why the curator, the editor, the compiler, and the anthologist have become such big figures. They are all people whose job it is to digest things, and to connect them together.
1521
1522Do you worry about everybody being a curator and nobody creating anything?
1523
1524To create meanings – or perhaps "new readings," which is what curators try to do – is to create. Period. Making something new does not necessarily involve bringing something physical into existence – it can be something mental such as a metaphor or a theory. More and more curatorship becomes inseparable from the so-called art part. Since there's no longer a golden line through the fine arts, you are acting curatorially all the time by just making a choice to be in one particular place in the field rather than another.
1525
1526In the traditional classical view, art objects are containers of some kind of aesthetic value. This value was put into them by the artist, who got it from God or from the Muse or from the universal unconscious, and then it radiated back out to those who beheld it. It was thus that missionaries played gramophone records of Bach to Africans in the expectation that it would civilize them, as though they would somehow be enriched by the flood of goodness washing over them. We now see the arrogance of this assumption, but I think few people understand what is really wrong about it, aside from its political incorrectness. What's wrong about it is that cultural objects have no notable identity outside of that which we confer upon them. This is a controversial and volatile statement. Their value is entirely a product of the interaction that we have with them. Duchamp's urinal was an exercise in this. Things become artworks not because they contain value, but because we're prepared to see them as artworks, to allow ourselves to have art experiences from them, before them, to frame them in contexts that confer value on them.
1527
1528Sometimes I get the sense that you could just as easily have been a scientist. What do you think artists are doing that is different from science?
1529
1530Interesting question. I think that art is not dangerous.
1531
1532You say art is not dangerous?
1533
1534The whole point of art, as far as I'm concerned, is that art doesn't make any difference. And that's why it's important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they're not real. You know they've been put on for you. And you know that you've agreed to participate in them. Artists deal in this rather nebulous area I call "the rehearsal of empathy." You're rehearsing a repertoire of feelings that you might have about things, of ways of reacting to things, of how it would feel to be in this situation. How it would feel to be in that person's place? What would I have done? Such questions are the most essential human questions because they deal with how we negotiate as mental beings through a complicated universe. A lot of what's learned is quite uncodifiable, because it isn't the same for everyone. In fact, nothing's ever the same for anyone – and those very individuated reactions don't fit well into a scientific frame. Just as complexity theory has helped us understand that linear systems are a very special and limited case, so in some senses we see that the whole of science must deal with special and limited cases. But experiences of culture prepare us for acts of improvisation by getting us used to the idea of enjoying uncertainty.
1535
1536Even your extremely logical denial is structured in a scientific way!
1537
1538
1539Designing music
1540
1541How is technology changing music?
1542
1543It's making it a lot easier to leave out the tracks I don't like! Before we had the record, music was an entirely ephemeral art. You were lucky if in your lifetime you heard a piece of music, especially a concert piece of music, more than half a dozen times. It would be an enormous thing for someone to hear, say, Beethoven's Fifth six times in a lifetime. So, what happened with recording is that suddenly you could hear exactly the same piece of music a thousand times, anywhere you chose to listen to it. And this of course gave rise to a whole lot of new possibilities within music. I think the growth of jazz, especially improvised jazz, was entirely due to recordings, because you can make sense of something on several hearings – even things that sound extremely weird and random on first hearing. I did an experiment myself last year in which I recorded a short piece of traffic noise on a street. It's about three and a half minutes long, and I just kept listening to it to see if I could come to hear it as a piece of music. So, after listening to this recording many times, I'd say, Oh yes, there's that car to the right, and there's that door slamming to the left, and I would hear that person whistling, and there's that baby coming by in the pram. After several weeks, I found I loved it like a piece of music.
1544
1545This future signals the breakdown of the singularity of the musical event. We can begin to see this in pop music, which is sort of fast and dirty. In the past, you would release a single, and then you'd release an album and the single would be on it. And then people started getting a bit more adventurous: they would release a different version on the single than on the album. Now people release an unbelievable number of things. They'll release six different versions of the single, then somebody else will do 12 different remixes of it, then it will come out another way a year later, then someone will change it 'round a couple of years after that. So, you don't have any sense of a specific identity for this piece of music. It becomes a description of a listening space that can be explored in different ways. We're back to hypertext again. I am sure this is going to be a very big part of the future.
1546
1547There seems to be another trend. Music has moved from being something you heard occasionally to something that has infiltrated every waking moment of our lives. We get it on the news, in cars and elevators, at sports games and in stores, where we work, and on our bedroom clock radios. What will happen when music becomes ubiquitous 24 hours a day?
1548
1549Of course, it may sacrifice some emotional power, but I sometimes imagine it may start to gain a kind of linguistic power – universality, specificity. As it becomes ubiquitous, people will want music purpose-designed much more. Just as you choose to arrange things and colors in your house in a particular way, I think you will choose music like that. Imagine that you order an evening of music over the Net. You say, "We're having a dinner, people should be able to talk over the music, I'm fond of Pachelbel's Canon and Joni Mitchell and Miles Davis. Can you put together three hours for me?" Whereupon the brain of the system looks through its ever-evolving "taste-clumps" – the product of continuous customer research – and says, "Someone who likes those things is quite likely to also enjoy some of the quieter moments of Hector Zazou, Jane Siberry, and Jon Hassell." It will compile a combination of all those. This is an autocurator. You could even tell it how experimental you wanted it to be: "Really surprise me – pull out a few long shots."
1550
1551There is a book called Elevator Music that calls elevator music and Muzak "furniture music" – utilitarian fixtures of our environment. It says more is going on in that kind of music than most people think.
1552
1553Yes! I'm always thrilled when someone suddenly says, Hey! you can take this seriously as well. It's like a new piece of the world that suddenly opens up for you.
1554
1555So what kind of cultural margins do you think we should be taking seriously now? I'm trying to take videogames and videogame music seriously. Videogame music is not music that I would listen to as on a CD, but automatically evolved video music would be a million times better than having to hear that idiot music that repeats itself over and over again. The number of hours that people listen to Mario Brothers music is probably greater than the total number of hours that people listen to Beethoven.
1556
1557That's probably true.
1558
1559The total number of hours that people are listening to game music probably exceeds all hours spent listening to classical music, so it's very important that there be some kind of mechanical music worth listening to. I see a place for machine music as somewhere between the handcrafted music sold on albums, and pure, canned, inane, repetitious stuff. Ideally, what we want in a videogame or an interactive experience is automatic music that's adjusting in real time to what we're doing. The music is changing depending on what's happening on the screen.
1560
1561Automatic music becomes interesting when it does something we didn't expect. Yet mere "didn't expect" isn't good enough – we have to already have a framework of expectations against which to be surprised. That framework can be simple – such as one's sense of wonder when the tape loops in Steve Reich's "It's Gonna Rain" mysteriously recombine to produce something apparently quite different from what they are. That's a surprise of synergy. Another kind of surprise is that of extension – such as when Dorothy Love Coates collapses down to that beautiful, heartbreaking low note in "Lord Don't Forget about Me," just when you thought she could never go any lower. That kind of surprise is difficult to get from a machine, because it depends so much on our empathy with another human, and on our belief that this music represents some feeling that a human is having or could have.
1562
1563Of course, a lot of the remixing of musical tracks – which is so fashionable now – has an automatic music feel about it: spin a few samples and see what they do together.
1564
1565The other thing about all this remixing is, who keeps track of the intellectual property rights as bits of music are passed from studio to studio?
1566
1567Intellectual rights is the hottest area going, and certainly not only in music. There are so many uniquely new problems. For example, I think of producing as the act of creating a sonic and conceptual overview of the record. And this type of creation is a whole new category for which there is no current copyright arrangement. When you're using sophisticated tools with very strong personalities, is the designer of the tools in some sense responsible for what finally comes out? Should that designer benefit? When a new tool or technology comes into existence, and suddenly 50 people at the same time see the same obvious idea, is it right that the one who gets to the publisher or patent office first should get all the material benefits of that idea? If not, how else do we share it?
1568
1569I'm impressed with Bruce Sterling, the science fiction writer. He's loaded much of his nonfiction writing onto the Net. He says, in effect, This is copyrighted, but you can make a copy of it for noncommercial reasons; go ahead, he says, spread it around. He calls it Literary Freeware. He encourages people to make a copy of a book of his that is still in print.
1570
1571I've always thought one of the most fantastic things about the Grateful Dead was that instead of sending heavies down into the crowd to smash people over the head and take their cassette recorders, they offered them a nice board to plug into so at least they got a decent recording.
1572
1573I'm curious about the economic motives of artists in these technological times. At the first hearing, ambient music sounds like music that was made because it could be made. When you were first making ambient music, did you expect anybody to buy it?
1574
1575Yes! As with everything I do, I expected it to be tremendously successful. [Laughs.]
1576
1577What led you to believe anybody else wanted to listen to that kind of music, as it was so mechanical and not fashionable?
1578
1579I'll tell you what it was. It was based on an observation that my tastes aren't that different from other people's. I always know that if I like something now, enough other people are going to like it soon enough. For instance, when I got into female body builders, every guy I knew was saying, Oh god! It's gross! I said, Oh yeah, this is just the last wall of resistance before they finally admit that they think these women are enormously sexy. Sure enough, they do now. I just admit to my tastes sooner. I don't have any embarrassment about what I like. It doesn't threaten what I've liked before even when it appears completely inconsistent with it. I don't mind the tension, and I don't think I have to compromise my whole theory of life to accept this thing. If I'm attracted to something, I immediately surrender to it. I offer no resistance to being seduced. Because I offer no resistance, I think that I sometimes touch things more quickly than other people do.
1580
1581=================
1582
1583Jugaad (a word taken from Hindi which captures the meaning of finding a low-cost solution to any problem in an intelligent way) is a new way to think constructively and differently about innovation and strategy. Jugaad innovation has a long-lasting tradition in India but is also widespread in the rest of the so-called Bric countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and numerous other emerging economies. Jugaad is about extending our developed world understanding of entrepreneurial spirit in the traditional Schumpeterian style (Joseph Schumpeter was the Austrian economist known as the prophet of innovation).
1584
1585Jugaad means thinking in a frugal way and being flexible, which, in turn, requires the innovator or entrepreneur to adapt quickly to often unforeseen situations and uncertain circumstances in an intelligent way.
1586
1587Intelligence in this context "isn’t about seeking sophistication or perfection by over-engineering products, but rather about developing a ‘good-enough’ solution that gets the job done". (Radjou et al., 2012, p. 109 ff.).[1]
1588
1589Jugaad (alternatively Juggaar) is a colloquial Hindi (Devanagari: जुगाड़) and Punjabi word, which has various meanings depending on the situation. Roughly translated, jugaad is a "hack".[1] It could also refer to an innovative fix or a simple work-around, a solution that bends the rules, or a resource that can be used in such a way. It is also often used to signify creativity—to make existing things work, or to create new things with meager resources.
1590
1591Jugaad is increasingly accepted as a management technique[2] and is recognized all over the world as an acceptable form of frugal engineering at peak in India.[3] Companies in India are adopting Jugaad as a practise to reduce research and development costs.[4] Jugaad also applies to any kind of creative and out-of-the-box thinking or life hacking that maximizes resources for a company and its stakeholders.
1592
1593According to experts at the University of Cambridge, jugaad is an "important way out of the current economic crisis in developed economies and also holds important lessons for emerging economies".[5]
1594
1595Exaptation (Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba's proposed replacement for what he considered the teleologically-loaded term "pre-adaptation"[1]) and the related term co-option describe a shift in the function of a trait during evolution. For example, a trait can evolve because it served one particular function, but subsequently it may come to serve another. Exaptations are common in both anatomy and behaviour. Bird feathers are a classic example: initially they may have evolved for temperature regulation, but later were adapted for flight. Interest in exaptation relates to both the process and products of evolution: the process that creates complex traits and the products (functions, anatomical structures, biochemicals, etc.) that may be imperfectly developed.[2][3]
1596
1597Exaptations include the co-option of feathers, which initially evolved for heat regulation, for display, and later for use in bird flight. Another example is the lungs of many basal fish, which evolved into the lungs of terrestrial vertebrates but also underwent exaptation to become the gas bladder, a buoyancy control organ, in derived fish.[10] A third is the repurposing of two of the three bones in the reptilian jaw to become the malleus and incus of the mammalian ear, leaving the mammalian jaw with just one hinge.[11]
1598
1599Exaptation: How Evolution Uses What's Available
1600
1601Evolution Is an Opportunist
1602
1603Evolution is littered with examples of opportunism. Hosts infected by viruses found new uses for the genetic material the agents of disease left behind; metabolic enzymes somehow came to refract light rays through the eye’s lens; mammals took advantage of the sutures between the skull bones to help their young pass through the birth canal; and, in the signature example, feathers appeared in fossils before the ancestors of modern birds took to the skies.
1604
1605In cases like these, evolution has made do by co-opting an existing trait for a new use when the right circumstances arose. These instances offer the lesson that a trait’s current use does not always explain its origin.
1606
1607In 1982, Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba gave a name to this phenomenon: exaptation. As they described it, exaptation is a counterpart to the more familiar concept of adaptation. While exaptations are traits that have been enlisted for new uses, adaptations have been shaped by natural selection for their current function, they wrote.
1608
1609The order and arrangement of the bones in the four limbs of land-dwelling animals are an exaptation for walking on land, since these limbs originally evolved for navigating water; by contrast, changes to the shape of the bones and to the musculature are adaptations, Gould and Vrba wrote.
1610
1611The concept has been controversial since it first arose, largely because it has been so difficult to distinguish between the forces of exaptation and adaptation in the historical context of evolution. Until recently, evidence for the co-opting of traits has been limited to case studies, such as the evolution of the feather. But examples from the morphological, behavioral and, increasingly, molecular realms have led some biologists to suspect that this phenomenon may play a much more sizable role in evolution than is generally appreciated.